Guy Kawasaki has authored over ten business books and he is also a co-founder of an online collection of resources covering popular topics called Alltop.com. He has formulated ten pieces of advice for entrepreneurs which can be summarized in the following paragraphs.
Firstly entrepreneurs must be focused on their goal. The ultimate goal of entrepreneurship is making money, hence, quality product and services are key to making money.
In order to stay focused which is key to achieving the goals, entrepreneurs should have something to remind them of their mission every time. This comes in form of mission statements or mantra’s. Guy Kawasaki’s advice to entrepreneur is to formulate a short mantra that sufficiently describes the entrepreneur’s cores values in very few words.
For an entrepreneur to make it in a big way, he will have to break away from his former behaviors and thinking patterns and come up with a fresh way of thinking that motivates towards achieving what seems impossible. He has to formulate acceptable ways of doing away with internal and external competition to his products and services and also be ready to polarize people because in process of achieving his goal he will not impress everyone.
The entrepreneur must move forward with his mission regardless of the prevailing conditions to achieve this he will have to avoid worrying and also have mentors and soul mates to encourage him all through. It is very important for the entrepreneur to be creative in designing products and services that are unique and of high value because this combination will yield highest returns compared to any other combination.
Aggressive marketing is the vital for the expansion of customer base hence the entrepreneur should market his products aggressively and be prepared for surprise’s because the market trends will not always match the entrepreneur’s predictions. In marketing his products the entrepreneur should focus more on early adopters and avoid pride at all costs. Kawasaki recommends that when entrepreneurs are making presentations to customers and investors, to prepare no more than ten presentation slides, use big font and not take more than half an hour doing the actual presentation in order to dedicate more time to questions.
In hiring, the entrepreneurs are advised to hire people who are better than themselves and give priority to people who are passionate about the product because shared passion is more vital than academic qualifications. Purchasing and using the product should be made very easy and barriers should be minimized if any and cynical people should not be allowed to bring entrepreneur’s ideas down.
Works Cited
The art of start. Guy, Kawasaki. Edinburgh: Informatics Forum. 2009. DVD.