How To Develop The Mindset Of An Entrepreneur

As an entrepreneur, it's highly unlikely your product or service will be truly unique. If your selling Shoes, SEO or Sun holidays, the chance is that someone else will be selling the same thing. The key in terms of mindset is to focus on selling the 'experience' of buying from you. This starts with you're marketing, right through to your aftersales service. By focusing on the way you talk to customers and interact on an ongoing basis gives you a point of difference. Think about buying a box of cornflakes from Target vs Whole Foods.

The way you're marketed for that product is different, the way its displayed in the store is different, the bag they are placed in is different. Ultimately, you'll also be spending more at Whole Foods. This is often referred to as 'adding value', but ultimately it's about the 'experience' you have when buying that product.

Contributors: Adam Pearce from Blend Commerce 

After college I worked for several years in manufacturing as an Industrial Engineer, doing what I loved the most - making things that people wanted to have and enjoy. Having been involved in doing startups for numerous others, I still wasn't sure that I could do it myself and was admittedly thoroughly fearful of making the leap from getting a paycheck from someone else to becoming completely self-sufficient.

I looked at this as analogous to jumping off a cliff with a parachute, pretty much a one-way trip, not being sure of when, where and how I would land. I spent a year visiting other startups in my specific area of interest, getting to know others that had done what I wanted to do (both successful and not), I took a couple of industry offered classes, read voraciously, spoke with countless potential future customers and retailers, created my roadmap (a business plan), took that leap, and have never looked back. This path is not for the faint of heart, it's a long and frightening one, but in the end well worth everything that went into it.

Contributors: Paul Allen from Hope Springs Distillery

Before Entrepreneurs can develop the correct mindset, they must first have a mind shift from that of an employee, to that of a business owner.

Many Entrepreneurs work for a company and want to start their own business. They know their job, however, they have no experience either building or running a company. An employee receives a paycheck just for showing up. Business owners only get a paycheck when they show up and build the business. Once they have a business owner's mindset, coupled with a serious amount of grit, they will then be in a position to have the correct mindset to become successful Entrepreneurs.

Contributors: V. Michael Santoro from Vaetas, LLC

There are many startups in stealth mode because founders are convinced that their ideas are so brilliant that as soon as they share it, someone else will steal it. Regardless of how brilliant your idea actually is, chances are most people you meet won't think it's brilliant, and the ones that do think it's brilliant don't have the time and resource to even get started on stealing it (people are completely preoccupied with their own jobs, family, and they only have 24 hours in a day after all).

The benefit of sharing your ideas is, by comparison, massive. Almost every ultimately-successful idea has been iterated a countless number of times from people's feedback. Sharing ideas with people you come across early on is an essential part of this feedback-gathering process and without it, you'll only be going down a path that makes sense in your head but does not solve anyone else's problems.

Contributors: Steve Long from The Travel Brief 

To become a successful entrepreneur, you have to do what successful entrepreneurs do. Get a mentor who already walked the path that is in front of you. A mentor will help you to avoid bad decisions and keep you motivated. You have to make sure to pick a mentor, who already walked the walk.

Contributors: Slavisa Tavic from Quergruender GmbH - getLaunched

Whether you are an Elon Musk or Richard Branson fan, reading autobiographies of various Entrepreneurs & business books is one of the fastest ways to strengthen your mindset & thinking by exploring the journey many other Entrepreneurs have been on. Self Help books are also very beneficial because they help you shape & create a growth mindset and in turn feel much more confident about what's required to successfully run a business.

Contributors: Raghav Parkash from Raghav Parkash Coaching

Talk to people and ask about their problems and struggles. I'm sure all of us have this kind of issues every single day, in our life, business, relationship. I'd say that asking questions is the best way to develop the mindset of an entrepreneur. WHY? should be your key questions to everything. Look anywhere to change the status quo in your mind, brainstorm solutions, do customer development, and maybe even build an MVP. No book, community, or person can make you become an entrepreneur. It's a marathon of the people you meet, conversations you have, the products you build and ideas you raise.

Contributors: Vlad Calus from Planable

Business operations of any type require statistics and various performancemetrics as they provide concrete and unfiltered information for anybusiness function. However, it is also important to learn to pay attentionto your instincts and emotions, because they often provide valuableinformation when read correctly.

This is relevant throughout many business decisions from human resources allocation to staff development topromotional capacity building.The better and more proficient an entrepreneur becomes with accessing andunderstanding their internal-world responses to external events, the morecapable they are of making wholly informed business decisions.

Contributors: Dmitri Oster from One World Counseling