When I first heard about these principles, I was in my thirties. It was so obvious, yet I found myself cheering, “Yes, I get it.” I needed to hear it for me to resonate with it. It started out to be only the first principle on the list, but over the years I’ve expanded it into five to break it down into even easier steps to follow.
I still have to keep going over these principles in my head when I start making things too complicated. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in a project things get way out of control. These principles are what I believe to be the core principles of what it takes to be an entrepreneur. And, if you plan on early retirement, you either need to be an entrepreneur and start your own personal business, or you will need to get there through investing, and stock investing is really popular and if you’re thinking on doing this to earn money you should also get a stock screener to find out what are the best stocks to invest at different times.
I’m choosing a path of a little of both. Many of you will already know these principles. If you do, I still hope you can get something from this article. If you haven’t heard these before and are an entrepreneur,
If you’ve never heard these and are not yet an entrepreneur, welcome to the world of entrepreneurship.
Make yourself useful.
Making yourself useful is the core principle of getting things rolling. I still remember riding in my car and listening to some business tapes or motivational stuff when they made this statement. It’s absolutely true. In order to make money, you need to provide value. You need to find something someone is willing to pay you to do or provide a product to solve someone’s problem.
It sounds obvious, but when I get mired in a project, trying to figure out what I believe is a very complicated series of problems, I step back and think about the situation at a basic level. I often find myself asking the question, “Am I making myself useful to this person or this group of people?”
If I’m struggling to figure out why traffic slowed or why sales dipped a little, I go back to the core principle. After a little while of thinking of the problem at a very basic level, answers oftentimes begin to show themselves.
It’s a very obvious basic question, but I think too many businesses get caught up in making things too complicated and they just need to step back and think of things at a core level.
A company my wife worked for years ago sold branded merchandise to businesses or personal brands like athletes or celebrities. They would set up say, a professional football player’s website, then stock it, and sell the merchandise for a particular player. One time she came home complaining about how they were struggling with this or that, I really don’t remember all the details. I looked at her and said, “You guys sell t-shirts and hats, don’t make it any more complicated.” The next day she went in and had a meeting. The CFO got up and said, “Look, we sell pens and t-shirts, it’s not rocket science.” They spent the rest of the meeting breaking things down to the core and had a good plan to fix all the problems they thought had been insurmountable the day before.
If you are a seasoned veteran or just starting out building your business, keep that core principle at the front of your mind and keep going back to it when things seem to get too complicated. Just provide value or be useful to a core group of people.
Find people who need your help.
The next thing you will need to do is find out where you want to help hang out. Are these online people clamoring to a certain social media platform or are they found more offline meeting up at trade shows or other brick-and-mortar social activities?
If these people are online, look for them on social sites like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram. Reddit has a wide network of what are called subreddits. Inside these subreddits are groups of people all talking and sharing about a whole slew of very niche topics. The subreddits have taken over where public forums used to be hot.
I used to be a part of many online forums. Many have died over the years. Most of the members are still online but have moved over to other places. Places like special Facebook groups or they follow and friend each other on Instagram or Twitter. You’ll need to search around using hashtags to lock in on your core group of people most likely to need what you want to sell.
For offline people, look for them at local meetups or trade shows. There are not too many niches though that have offline communities which don’t have even larger communities online.
There is one thing to be aware of when examining these places. Make sure it is a community of buyers and not just sellers like you. If the place you decide to settle in and start selling your stuff is loaded with other people all selling the same stuff, you’re in the wrong place. This happened to me on Twitter. I started looking at different hashtags trying to find an audience. When I found some people all talking about the same thing, I thought, cool, I found my people. On further examination, I noticed we were all sellers. I had to move over to a different group of people who actually had buyers. Twitter is a little weird because every one of your followers is mashed up into your feed. It may take a little time, but finding your group of potential buyers is going to be essential if you want to sell something.
Connect with those people.
Now that you found out where those people are who want to buy what you are selling, it’s time to start the conversation. Start talking to them and getting to know more about them. Starting a conversation and getting involved is going to do two main things for your business.
First, it’s going to help you understand their problem better and build them a better product to buy. Second, it’s going to build trust with them and work them down the path to a sale. The conversations knock off the two biggest hurdles any business has to overcome. These are having a product people want and need and convincing them that you are the one who needs to sell it to them.
These are the core principles of any business transaction. If you have an existing business that is struggling a little bit, step back and examine your business from these core values. Ask yourself whether what you are doing in conversation with your audience aligns with their values and moves them toward the sale and whether the product you are offering is really what they want and need,
The solution only comes through the conversation. Get on social media sites and start getting to know them. Get out to brick-and-mortar events and start shaking their hands.
Find out what they are willing to pay for and what they expect for free.
There is another factor that has evolved over the years mainly because of the internet. With so much free content and services, what is your customer willing to pay for and what do they expect for free?
The good old typewriter and word processor market.
I’m typing this on a word processor right now. This technology years ago would cost someone a good amount of money to put on their computer. It probably has put the entire typewriter industry out of business, I think. I don’t know for sure, but when I go to the store, I don’t ever see any for sale anymore. Now I’m typing this piece on free software hosted by Google over the internet.
Microsoft still makes a word processor you can buy over the counter for PC and Mac, but a large segment of their market has been chewed up by Google with the free product. Word processors come bundled on every computer now. I don’t know about windows machines, but mac has a pages app you can buy incredibly cheap. It was something like $30. Windows machines used to come bundled with Works which is a stripped-down word processor similar to Word. The point I’m trying to make is, do people value word processors anymore when there are so many free or very cheap major players on the market?
Slice an original market to make it something worth buying.
But, some of the word processor markets took a different turn by creating not only word processors, but document processors and special software to aid specific segments of users. Scrivener was created to help writers not only as a word processor, but help them build their entire project. Scrivener dissected the market for word processors into a submarket of writers who use word processors. If your market has devolved into something people no longer want to pay for or something so cheap it’s not worth selling, try rebuilding your product to slice a larger market into something smaller.
Start building a direct communication channel with them.
Let’s look at this from a larger, different point of view. Let’s say you are sitting in a large lecture hall and you are giving a lecture and there is some conversation. Some people’s questions get answered, but there are specifics to every scenario. Everyone’s situation is a little different. Each individual may have specific questions regarding their situation. Now you need to get with them one on one to answer their questions or reassure them they are making the right decision.
There are several ways to do this. Some are a little easier, some get more complicated. There are messaging systems in place on most social media channels where people can start an even more private conversation with you. This takes time and is great for a start-up or small private business, but scalability is not its best side. I think in the future businesses may have to adopt this mentality of personalized chat or be put out of business, but not quite yet.
What about email?
Email is another alternative and a much cheaper one. Getting people on an email list where you send out regular email newsletters is a good way to build contact with a particular niche group but take it one step further and tell them to reply to the emails to continue the conversation to specifically target their concerns. Not only will you have a private channel right to their inbox to keep in touch with them, but you have opened up a private conversation with them on that channel. No, email isn’t dead yet. People keep trying to kill it in favor of the newest social network or chat system, but many markets are still finding incredible open rates with email.
To some of you, this may sound be a simple refresher, to others it may be a revelation that gets your wheels turning to get out there and start making it happen. Whatever this is to you I hope it’s the motivation to get you moving in the direction you want.
These are just some core principles of business. This is meant to get you thinking at a fundamental stage and build a business for yourself with a solid foundation. It doesn’t have to be a large multi-million dollar-a-year business. It could be as simple as a one-person freelance enterprise. These principles apply to just about every business model I could think of. Just get out there and start doing it.