1. Validate your idea and analyze potential clients to find common interests among them.
2. Get yourself a great co-founder.
3. Give yourself the chance to refine your path or adapt where necessary.
4. Challenge yourself and develop the kind of disposition where you’re open to having your ideas challenged with honest feedback.
5. Read about and follow the thought leaders in your industry.
6. Solve a problem and be certain that your product is the most appealing solution.
7. Strategy is driven by tremendous amount of research and knowing a particular market.
8. Be certain that your product solves a problem before you even start.
9. Find a way to make money and preserve it
10. Make sure that you and your company have a vision and mission different from just earning a lot of money.
11. Get investors who are critical of what you are doing and will be a great asset.
12. Honest feedback is seriously priceless (if you can handle it!).
13. Teamwork and interdependency is key.
14. You have to deliver results, but in a meaningful way that is fun to do.
15. You have to transform your energy as a founder to your people: motivate and inspire them.
16. The drive and energy are key. If it’s not there you need to fix that immediately and find somebody who can do that.
17. Approach your clients, employees and other stakeholders with great enthusiasm.
18. Stay close to the customer even during development. Don’t go off for a year to develop something and then show it to the world.
19. Set a goal, find out what you are good at and choose that career path. Informed risk will benefit the future in the long run.
20. Never start a business just for the money, you must love what you do.
21. Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and ask for business!
22. Be judiciously generous with your time, energy and wisdom-share.
23. Mentoring and leading may not offer you immediate financial return, but they mark a person as committed to giving as taking.
24. Strive for balance between professional and personal commitments.
25. An excellent idea with poor execution is a lost stake and is a fundamental cause of failure in any business or venture.
26. Never get into business with anyone you wouldn’t want to have dinner with on a regular basis.
27. If you are the smartest guy in the room, you are in the wrong room. Unless of course you are playing cards.
28. There is only one sure way to fail, and that is to give up.
29. There is no course or book that teaches experience.
30. Accept your mistakes as tuition to the school of hard knocks. And try not to take the same course twice.
31. Respect the customer’s right to make their own decisions.
32. Your job is to help customers make informed decisions so they can brag to their friends later. That produces referrals.
33. Patience builds trust. Trust closes deals.
34. Sincerely take care of your customers first and you will be taken care of as a by-product.
35. Behind each business or customer you deal with is a human being, be sure to communicate with them as people.
36. Stop managing and start initiating change that will improve productivity, profitability and goodwill.
37. Be grateful for the challenges you’ve been given and strive to make a difference where you are.
38. When your heart is no longer in it, take a risk and move on to a new adventure.
39. Use your position to create opportunities for others.
40. Never give in to that paranoid feeling that the person under you will know your job better than you.
41. Conversely – always know at a higher level what is going on in the detail.
42. Be in a position to offer intelligent advice/trouble shooting when required.
43. Don’t just think outside the box: DESTROY the box.
44. Listen. Silence is gold.
45. Treat your customers like royalty and your employees like customers.
46. Helping an angry customer/client builds positive word-of-mouth!
47. Few companies innovate with any degree of consistency.
48. Creativity encourages innovation and innovation is key to the development of new business concepts.
49. If you want to stay ahead of your competition, the time to innovate is NOW.
50. Allow customers to communicate with employees in real-time if you can.
51. Creativity fosters innovation, your startup needs to stand out among your competitors.
52. Encourage employees to spend an afternoon designing and producing prototypes for new products.
53. Concentrate on team culture, learn from your mistakes, and aim to resolve problems quickly.
54. Share the long term vision with everyone in the company.
55. Have a clear business mission that is innovative, such as “to revolutionize the marketplace globally”.
56. Create, encourage and reward recreation.
57. Provide lots of free time for employees to think about how they improve the product.
58. Give everyone a forum that encourages them to share.
59. Encourage employees to do something they have never before attempted like giving a presentation or host a meeting.
60. Reward innovative ideas with packages you have never attempted before, eg offer employees equity in the company.
61. Instead of paying 100% of your marketing dollars to agencies take that money and go experiment.
62. Instead of a strict schedule, make room for flexibility.
63. Encourage your employees to be creative about how they help clients.
64. Get your team involved. Make them feel like they are part of the decision process.
65. Encourage your engineers and product managers devote 10 percent of their work weeks to new ideas.
66. Encourage your employees to think outside the box without fear of critical review.
69. Empower staff through confidence building. Offer opportunities for team members to develop.
70. Founders should create relaxed, fun, and open plan environment.
71. Nurture and grow an internal culture that is young, dynamic, fresh, and continually striving to achieve.
72. Encourage an “ideas bank” where ideas are stored for future use.
73. Establishing teams as a platform to share information and provide members with a sense of ownership
74. Teams should be encouraged to question traditional methods and embrace new ideas.
75. Reward initiative and creativity by creating specific and measurable ways for innovators to benefit from their work.
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