7 Key Lessons for New Entrepreneurs

Intended to help you if you have recently started your own business or currently work for someone else and you’re seriously considering it, here are seven key lessons I’ve learnt in my 20-year career in technology and communications, a journey that has taken me from more junior level to senior corporate positions to CEO of my own successful business. Gary Gould, CEO of Compare Cloudware

1 Despise the 9-5 working day. If you enjoy what you’re doing and you’re learning – keep going. Working for yourself often means making sacrifices and having to work long, hard days is often par for the course. But don’t be a martyr. Don’t neglect your family or miss important family moments or events – they won’t come around again.

2 Learn from bad bosses. Many of us will have had them and you can learn much from their shortcomings. This can help you later on when you become an employer. Don’t normalise poor management or their unhealthy habits; it can prove very harmful when running your own business.

3 Don’t compromise your values. Values are important in business. If you think something is unacceptable, it probably is, so don’t do it.

4 Don’t be afraid of new ideas. Avoid the ‘but it’s always been done that way’ mindset. Be prepared to challenge established thinking; look for new ideas that will enable your business to be more successful. Bounce your ideas off people close to you who you can trust. And if you’re currently working for someone else but have an original idea you plan to turn into a new business, be very careful about whom you share your ideas with.

5 Know the difference between tenacity and insanity. Nobody likes a quitter, but, equally, being successful at failure doesn’t help anyone. Set goals and judge your performance against them. Avoid deceiving yourself.

6 Embrace brick walls. Sometimes brick walls are big red warning signs that you’d be foolish to ignore. Ask yourself why there is a brick wall or even if the brick wall is really there. Breaking through such barriers is part and parcel of being an entrepreneur, but if you see more brick walls than opportunities, starting your own business might not be the best option for you, at least for the time being.

7 Overnight success stories are rare. When I came up with the idea for Compare Cloudware, the market wasn’t ready, so it was incubated for about a year so I could concentrate on creating a robust business model. After that, a visual concept was developed, followed by a working model, then a minimum viable product (MVP), then, finally, something I was ready to share with investors. I only gave up my day job once I had an MVP. I learned this diligence in my previous corporate life and getting to grips with large projects has also proved invaluable. So be eager to learn, but show patience when it comes to ideas that need cultivating and stress-testing.

Copyright © 2015 Gary Gould, CEO of Compare Cloudware, one of the first comparison sites for cloud applications.