A QUOTE TO PONDER
You Only Have to be Right Once
3 secrets for growing a successful business
Continuing from an earlier post:
Just sharing the entrepreneurial wisdom of billionaire enrepreneur Mark Cuban:
3. Don’t lie to yourself
Even
though you have faith in your business, people aren’t going to buy from you
automatically. You have to be honest with yourself both about your strengths
and your weaknesses.
“All
entrepreneurs lie to themselves. We all go through the same process. We tell
ourselves, ‘This is the best, everybody loves us, no one is going to not like
product.’ Of course that is not true. What I like to tell people is, ’when you
have a company, when you are an entrepreneur, you have to figure out how to
kick your own a-- before someone else does it for you.
“You
have to look at your own company and be brutally honest with yourself and say,
‘What do we do well?’ That’s great. But also be honest and say, ‘What do we not
do well? Where are our challenges? And then how can we improve them?’”
Continuing from an earlier post:
Just sharing the entrepreneurial wisdom of billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban:
2. Selling is helping
“Number
two: Selling is not convincing. Selling is helping,” says Cuban.
The
secret to being a great salesperson is getting to know your customer’s needs
and problems and providing them a solution.
“The
whole concept of being a great salesperson is not about who can talk the
fastest — even though I am talking kinda fast — it’s not about who can talk the
most nonsense, it’s about taking the time to understand the needs of the person
you are selling to.
“Because
if you can’t create a benefit for them, if you can’t show them why your product
is going to be better for them and their life than the other options out there
or what they were doing before, you are not going to have a company.”
Just sharing the entrepreneurial wisdom of billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban:
1. Sales come first
No
matter what your business, you have to be a salesperson.
“Number
one: Sales cures all. There has never been a company in the history of
companies that has ever succeeded without sales. Anybody who has ever told you,
‘Don’t worry about sales you can grow it and worry about sales later,’ they are
lying to you."
“They
will fail, you will fail. You have to be able to sell and do you know who the
biggest salesperson in your company has to be? You.”
"Do you know who the biggest salesperson in your company has to be? You."
Just sharing two schools of thought about writing a business plan!
When Elon Musk has a new start-up idea, he typically skips a crucial stage of getting the business off the ground: He doesn’t create a business plan.
Over the last two decades, Musk has helped build a slew of successful companies, from PayPal to Tesla and SpaceX — making him the world’s richest person, with a net worth of $258 billion, according to Bloomberg. And he’s done that while going directly against the grain of conventional entrepreneurship wisdom.
Musk admitted to throwing out the idea of developing a written roadmap that typically defines a company’s objectives and goals at the South by Southwest conference in 2018. “I had a business plan way back in the Zip2 days,” he said. “But these things are always wrong, so I just didn’t bother with business plans after that.”
Zip2 was Musk’s first major start-up: He co-founded the company, which helped newspapers design city guides, with his brother Kimbal in 1995. It wasn’t exactly a failure — after four years, the brothers sold Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million in cash.
But those four years convinced Musk that things rarely go according to plan in the start-up world. So, ahead of launching his next company, X.com — which eventually merged with a competitor, Confinity, to become PayPal — Musk resolved to scrap the plan entirely.
Musk and his partners would go on to sell PayPal to eBay in 2002, in a $1.5 billion stock deal.
Many prominent experts and start-up icons disagree with Musk’s strategy: Not creating a business plan is often cited as one of the most common mistakes an entrepreneur can make, especially for anyone trying to raise money.
Mark Cuban, a fellow billionaire, says he believes in business plans — often conducting extensive research before launching or investing in a business. For him, the key is to leave it “open for change,” so you can adapt when your original plan starts to go awry.
Richard Branson, another billionaire, is also known as a huge proponent of writing down his business plans. “A business plan doesn’t have to be a lengthy, well-thought-out proposal,” Branson once wrote in a blog post. “it can be as simple as some notes in a notebook, or a scribble on the back of an envelope.”
Branson added that you shouldn’t need to wait to have a formal, perfected plan to get started — an idea also championed by other billionaire entrepreneurs like Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, as CNBC Make It noted in 2017.
Instead of writing a business plan, Musk said, aspiring entrepreneurs should ask themselves some simple questions before getting started. “You really have to ask whether something is true or not,” he said, and whether your business idea legitimately “makes sense.”
“If it ever feels like it’s too easy, it probably is,” Musk added. [Excerpted from CNBC Report: Why Elon Musk doesn’t like to follow business plans: ‘These things are always wrong’]
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