Becoming a successful entrepreneur is not for the feint hearted -and let me tell you - the odds are not in your favour!!!!
There’s no shortcut…. And the risks are massive !!!!
Steve Blank’s latest article on needing to go through the hard yards of peeling potatoes to doing the crummy inane jobs - like peeling potatoes - was all part of the process enabling him to become a successful #entrepreneur!!
You can read as many self help books and how the Facebook NVIDIA and Amazon have done it ….. but unless you’ve done it , failed, pivoted , failed again , and joined that exclusive club - “club fear” - 😨 - the chances of making it are thin!
Some sage advice ….. If you’re not passionate about what you do - get a job!!!! !
Spoiler 🔔 alert
To create a perfect product ….. there are a number of things that need to get done to make it right….. and you need to make it right every time !!!!
some of the lessons
💥While peeling potatoes during basic training- a mundane job - was bfo 1 (blinding flash of the obvious) unless you do it right - you not gonna feed 10,000 people!!!
💥Worked for months telemarketing
making appointments for a startup -
💥understanding that to get 1 sale - we needed to make 100calls and send out 20 proposals ! (Taking the concept of “knowing your numbers to a new level)
💥Answered 100s of Requests For Proposals (RFP’s.)
💥Designed tradeshow booths, spent long nights at shows setting them up, and long days inside them during the shows.
💥Write 1000s of blogs, and made countless sales presentations
💥flew to hundreds of customer meetings on red-eyes at a drop of a hat (making sales guys rich and gaining a huge appreciation for their skills.)
💥Partnered with engineering trying to understand what customers really wanted, needed and would pay for, versus what we could actually build and deliver (and learning the difference between a simply good engineer and working in the presence of sheer genius.)
💥In the sprint to completing a government tender issued on 20 December that had to be completed by 31 December , slept under the desk in my office with our entire team!
💥Each of those crummy, tedious, exhausting jobs and the 100s more - made me understand how hard they were.
Each made me appreciate the complexity of the systems (with people being the most valuable) that make up successful companies.
It made me understand that they were doable, solvable and winnable.
By the time our business started taking shape - I knew what each job in our organisation meant because I had done every one of them.
I knew what it took to get each job done and cog turned (and screw them up) which has given me a huge respect for every member of our team ….. without their passion and dedication and expertise - our business would never have survived!
to read about some Aussie success stories - here’s Venture Capital in Australia https://lnkd.in/gGqHJpaM
