As budding entrepreneurs, it’s very easy for us to think that we have all the answers and yet we can have biases as an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurialism is defined by moving forward to establish a new norm that no one else has thought of yet, securing your profitability and creating something bigger than yourself. For that reason, you almost have to be too big for your boots as a foundational, crucial requirement.
However, it’s also true that despite past expertise and despite your skillsets, it’s important to look at your current state of being for the potential flaws you might hold. This effort can help you avoid being too brittle that you learn nothing. Remember that the markets move quickly, and that which you may have taken for granted not long back may not prove true in the current times.
This can be important, but it can also be quite enlightening to consider that shaking your biases as an entrepreneur is an essential process you should never take for granted. Let’s consider how to achieve that then, perhaps in the most healthy context imaginable:
Reading outside of your subject area is an important opportunity to help you overcome your biases as an entrepreneur. It helps you challenge your thinking, consider other perspectives, and also gain a baseline of understanding surrounding topics you may not be so well-versed in. For instance, it might be that you’re highly developed when it comes to the technical innovation of a product. However, this doesn’t really help you manage people.
For that, reading even basic guides and introduction manuals for this is important. Self-help books can also help you become more of a leader and a visionary, or at least more akin to take on responsibility. It can also benefit you to read into the history of your chosen discipline and industry, helping you gain essential context that you may have otherwise done without. The more you can consider this an appropriate and even possible path forward, the better you will become. Too many entrepreneurs, finding preliminary success, often think they have nothing to learn and nothing to develop. In this role, you are both brand and ambassador. For that reason, continually challenging yourself and shaking your biases in this way is a worthwhile and sometimes even revelatory practice.
Analyzing the market is also essential. Markets move quickly, and so it can sometimes take us more time than we appreciate to become fully versed in them, and to stay present. For this reason, heavy market research, continually, looking at trends and the biggest players is essential.
It’s also important to understand what innovation is taking place. If in the tech sector, for example, researching into Google’s latest acquisitions can provide you with much context going forward. That can be a tremendously worthwhile and advantageous effort to keep up on, and you never know, it might just be the tool that helps you get ahead of the competition. A thorough understanding of time and place is essential.
Analyzing the market also means performing your own market research. Seeing if there’s a market for your product means running focus groups, speaking to industry professionals, and measuring the logistics. It might be totally theoretical right now - but could your idea ever make it to mass production? What areas of the industry are you most likely to enter? Asking yourself these questions and never being one hundred percent sure of your answer can help you work with probabilities rather than dumb confidence. That’s certainly a better option going forward.
Of course, it’s essential to stay completely aware of your progress and what that means going forward. This means that when it comes to social media engagement, surveys, industry metrics, reviews, and customer data, you stay completely aware of what the actual figures are and what this means.
It might be, for instance, that your startup isn’t really engaging the demographic you had assumed, but a different one entirely. What does this mean? How can these metrics inspire you to further research and consideration? From there, what kind of effort can help you going forward to fix or resolve these errors, or make use of this opportunity?
Real metrics are great. They help you truly stay aware of your actual progress, rather than your expected progress. This helps visionary thinkers stay grounded, which every entrepreneur needs to learn.
Not all entrepreneurs need or even want a partner, but those that do must ensure they are capable, handy, effective, honest, and most importantly, challenging. Of course, it might not seem like that’s the best idea. Who would want to work with a challenging person? However, using this term, we mean to say that your partner should be able to push back against your ideas, keep you in check, stay committed to their side of the business. You should perform the same role for them. Working together seamlessly isn’t always the most ideal, it’s important to both agree on the grounding principles of your business, to communicate open and effectively, but also to keep on your toes and always look for the best result. That requires commitment to progress and care. It requires challenge.
While it’s not always a good predictor of the future, looking into the past can help us glean insight into any biases as an entrepreneur that we may not have had otherwise. For instance, you may find that when you delve into historical changes, you begin to understand how industries can change on a dime. What happened at the start of lockdown? How has technology influenced your industry in the last three to five years? Understanding this helps you gain some context for what your decisions should be now, and if anything, that can help you understand that the ground you stand on isn’t always so secure.
Take anything for granted as an entrepreneur and you’re already less effective than you could be. It might be that some customers have followed you from a previous enterprise - never take them for granted. It might be that you have a good amount of technical IT knowledge - that doesn’t mean you can’t enlist the help of a managed IT service to help you effectively outfit yourself and your team in the best possible way.
It could be that you believe a certain marketing strategy is always for the best - but how has Covid-19 and its associated lockdowns changed that? The more you think presently, and the less you take for granted, the more opportunities and possible elements of potential you can consider. That has to be a beneficial approach.
Understanding legal frameworks is essential. It’s quite okay not to be a masterful legal expert in business. It’s not okay to ignore that these essential guidelines and policies exist for a reason. Educating ourselves should always be paramount.
Luckily, taking an active interest in this and hiring help where necessary is more than enough. For instance, there are many essential legal advice websites online dedicated to bringing you the most pressing and insightful commentary, helping you digest complex concepts in a manner you can understand and even integrate into your firm. This has to be one of the most helpful, appropriate and disciplinary practices you could integrate into your schedule. At the very least, it can help you stay aware of the best legal practice. At the very best, it could directly influence your success and effectiveness in a legal situation.
With this advice, shaking your biases as an entrepreneur is essential to your craft.
