Entrepreneurship: 5 Key Steps
31 March 2016
Read by 4729 persons
Creating your own company, your small "business", being an entrepreneur and your own boss, who hasn't thought about it? The idea is as appealing as its implementation can be complicated and fraught with pitfalls.
Here are some key steps to keep in mind to succeed in your project.
Listen to your intuition and confront market reality
When launching a business creation project, it's easy to gather a ton of information, to be overwhelmed by numbers, by advice. Yet, nothing can indicate what the turnover will be after the first year of work, nothing can guarantee any success, nothing helps to feel less uncertain in turbulent and demanding markets.
Continuing to think about the project, to enrich and nurture the idea is, of course, essential, but it is not at all a question of seeking any perfection, or illusory security, otherwise the project will never see the light of day.
Your personal intuition remains the best certainty. So don't hesitate to confront the reality of the field as quickly as possible by choosing to make "micro-decisions" beforehand, by facing the reality of your "clients" without waiting.
Focus on the right questions
When starting a project, full of good will, one imagines, with a lot of good faith and naiveté, that finding solutions to problems is the most difficult part. This is a beginner's mistake: in 80% of difficulties, solutions are very quickly accessible.
The real difficulty does not lie there. Indeed, the challenge is rather to verify that the problems we are solving correspond well to what matters most to customers. How is it possible to know? Once again, by testing reality, theirs, as quickly as possible.
There's no point in concentrating your efforts on what doesn't create value in the eyes of your users!
Keep the user as a central reference
This advice is given by the greats. This is, for example, Google's vision: Google has never developed products to maximize its market value but has sought to place and keep its users at the center of its concerns, at the center of everything.
Think about focusing first on the customers you want to reach!
Undertake, build a company
Everything seems to revolve around the service or product that we offer and develop. False.
Obsessed with the idea of improvement, of monetizing the product, entrepreneurs lose sight of the essential: setting up your company is not "just" developing your product. It is building a company, that is to say a human, administrative, financial universe, but also a legal and tax structure, human resources, relations with partners, etc.
All these implementations represent a significant amount of time in the life of an entrepreneur and have nothing to do with ideas, strategy or the unavoidable and obsessive product.
Share ideas
Like the world, good ideas and successful companies are not created in a day!
The process of long iterations, perpetual back and forth between your ideas and those of others, particularly your users, is your best ally.
It's up to you to evolve and maintain yourself in an energy of constant innovation and improvement, even when it comes to the problems you want to solve.
It is through permanent exploration, through the combination of several ideas, various reflections, numerous experiences, through the sharing of ideas that these latter are drawn, refined and finally become solid, perfectly viable and sustainable projects.
Philippe Montant
CEO ReKrute
Here are some key steps to keep in mind to succeed in your project.
Listen to your intuition and confront market reality
When launching a business creation project, it's easy to gather a ton of information, to be overwhelmed by numbers, by advice. Yet, nothing can indicate what the turnover will be after the first year of work, nothing can guarantee any success, nothing helps to feel less uncertain in turbulent and demanding markets.
Continuing to think about the project, to enrich and nurture the idea is, of course, essential, but it is not at all a question of seeking any perfection, or illusory security, otherwise the project will never see the light of day.
Your personal intuition remains the best certainty. So don't hesitate to confront the reality of the field as quickly as possible by choosing to make "micro-decisions" beforehand, by facing the reality of your "clients" without waiting.
Focus on the right questions
When starting a project, full of good will, one imagines, with a lot of good faith and naiveté, that finding solutions to problems is the most difficult part. This is a beginner's mistake: in 80% of difficulties, solutions are very quickly accessible.
The real difficulty does not lie there. Indeed, the challenge is rather to verify that the problems we are solving correspond well to what matters most to customers. How is it possible to know? Once again, by testing reality, theirs, as quickly as possible.
There's no point in concentrating your efforts on what doesn't create value in the eyes of your users!
Keep the user as a central reference
This advice is given by the greats. This is, for example, Google's vision: Google has never developed products to maximize its market value but has sought to place and keep its users at the center of its concerns, at the center of everything.
Think about focusing first on the customers you want to reach!
Undertake, build a company
Everything seems to revolve around the service or product that we offer and develop. False.
Obsessed with the idea of improvement, of monetizing the product, entrepreneurs lose sight of the essential: setting up your company is not "just" developing your product. It is building a company, that is to say a human, administrative, financial universe, but also a legal and tax structure, human resources, relations with partners, etc.
All these implementations represent a significant amount of time in the life of an entrepreneur and have nothing to do with ideas, strategy or the unavoidable and obsessive product.
Share ideas
Like the world, good ideas and successful companies are not created in a day!
The process of long iterations, perpetual back and forth between your ideas and those of others, particularly your users, is your best ally.
It's up to you to evolve and maintain yourself in an energy of constant innovation and improvement, even when it comes to the problems you want to solve.
It is through permanent exploration, through the combination of several ideas, various reflections, numerous experiences, through the sharing of ideas that these latter are drawn, refined and finally become solid, perfectly viable and sustainable projects.
Philippe Montant
CEO ReKrute
