Before you start a business, here are 20 lessons from top entrepreneurs you need to know before you start your business.

1. 👉🏻 Before You Start a Business. Before you invest in a business, invest in yourself.

• Find your why, your passion, what makes you angry, and what excites you.
• Have a clear WHY.
• Understand what is within your reach, your strengths, and your limits💪🏻.
• Instead of letting your weaknesses limit you, find someone you can collaborate with so you can leverage each other’s abilities.
• Guiding Questions 🖊️
  • What are your strengths?
  • What are your weaknesses?
  • What resources do you have within your reach?
  • What do you have access to?
  • What are you passionate about?
  • What moves you?

2. Be Hungry and Patient ☕️. Entrepreneurship comes with ups and downs, and some are very drastic. You will have many good days and many bad ones, too.

3. 📝 Storytelling: people want to hear a story—not your story, the product’s story. 

• Build a brand around the product. Let the brand talk; sometimes, it’s not all about the product. You do need a great product, though. Otherwise, customers won’t come back, but in today’s world, Brand-Building is extremely important. 

• Clear why, vision, and mission💥. This is very important, especially when building a brand; you want to be clear and consistent in your message. Take Nike as an example. They find different ways to convey the message, but the core message is the same. For years, the message has been the same, and people like the message.  

4. Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Pilot, Test, Product Market Fit (PMF). Research, study, understand, and implement these concepts. They will save you a lot of time, mistakes, and money!

• Start small, validate your idea, and then invest.

• Don’t invest before you test! 💸 Don’t invest too heavily in branding, packaging, inventory, or anything else if you don’t know how the market will respond. Test, test, test ‼️. Then, iterate and build on that.  

5. 🆕 Pivot. Be willing to make changes if it doesn’t work, even if the change means going from a B2C to a B2B model (Business-to-Consumer to Business-to-Business).

6. Vision 👀. From the beginning, have a long-term vision. Start building your business with that in mind. Create the infrastructure you will need to scale.

7. 👥 Network and Your Circle of Reference.

• Identify key players 🗝️ — people who will be key to your success. 

• Be willing to share, whether that is your idea, your project, your successes, failures, or mistakes. 
• Feedback: be willing to listen to both the positive and negative. 

• People are humans, not superhumans; be wise in choosing who you listen to. 

8. NO 🚫. Don’t take someone’s “no” as an ultimate no. Every great entrepreneur has been told “no” too many times. 

9. Keys for a Competitive Product 📦.

• Pricing
• Customer Service
• Consistency and Quality
• Customer Experience 
• Marketing

10. 🌱Growth and Scale . If you want to scale your company, you will need easily repeatable processes and protocols. This includes your organizational culture, organizational plan, and, of course, everything related to your core offering.

11. Tracking and Traceability 📈. 

• Analytics. Super important for eCommerce and everything else.
• 🧐Know your customer, identify trends and patterns, be able to predict their next purchase or products they may be interested in.
• Measure! Choose the metrics that are right for you and use them to your advantage. Make decisions based on that.

12. 💻 What to Include in a Pitch? You should be clear, concise, and convincing. Here are a few essentials you should include, not necessarily in this order:

• The Problem
• The Idea
• Value Proposition 
• Competitors and Differentiation
• Business Model
• Target Market
• Marketing and Sales Strategy
• Financials and Key Metrics
• Economic Projections: ROI, CAPEX, etc.
• Growth Strategy
• Objectives
• Founding Team
• Call to Action (CTA)

13. Don’t compare yourself with others. Compete with yourself. If you are growing, you’re on the right track 🛣️.

14. 🎯 Set short-, medium-, and long-term Goals. Measurable and Objective Goals. SMART Goals.

• Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely ⏰. 
• Simply saying you want to “grow” is not 🙅🏻‍♀️a goal. You need to make it SMART. 
• Want to keep your team and yourself accountable and motivated? Here’s what Larry Fink (Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Blackrock) does. At the end of the year, he sends an annual results and objectives letter 📝stating what was achieved and the goals for next year.

15. Because It Matters to You 🫵🏻. Don’t start a company because X or Y person said it would succeed; start a company because you care about it. You care about the pain you are solving, you care about the problem, the market, the future…

16. 👀 Focus.

• You don’t achieve anything trying to go in a million different directions, you achieve something when you focus.
• Don’t try to do everything. Have a clear target. Too much diversification may not be beneficial.

17. Success and Failure 📉. Learn from your failures and KEEP GOING. 🧗🏻‍♀️

• Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure is your best teacher; learn from your failures and mistakes.

18. Leverage Trends. This includes social networks and technology within your reach 👩🏻‍💻.

• Read Books, Research Papers, Reports from analysts and consulting firms, and so on… LEVERAGE your Resources. 

19. ✔️Create and Design Based on Client Needs.

• Know your market
• How scalable is your market?
• 👂🏻Listen to your clients
• Define Your Buyer Persona. Emphasis on “your”, don’t try to copy other companies’ buyer persona.
• Talk with Consumers
• Build a Community
• Be the Voice of Your Customer 📢

20. 🎨 Creativity. They say everyone is creative in their own way. In my opinion, it’s almost everyone, not necessarily everyone 🤷🏻‍♀️.

• Creativity is a muscle that you need to work on 🧠.
• To foster creativity, don’t judge ideas; write all your ideas down and create an environment where ideas can flow. 💡 Even lighting matters!

21. BONUS. A personal note.

• 🎢 Don’t start if you are not willing to have good and bad days. If you are not willing to feel like you are on a high one day and at the lowest of lows the next. It’s an up-and-down, it’s deciding, and so it’s also sacrifice. It’s not like it seems in movies or social media.

Things to Remember Before You Start a Business

• 📊 Excel can resist anything, and everyone’s a millionaire in Excel. 
• 💻 Research. 
• 👎🏻 Don’t be a perfectionist when you start. 
• 💸 You WILL lose money, and you will learn.
• ❗️You will fail. It’s part of trying and succeeding. 
• 💡Execution is more important than having many ideas. Some even say execution is more important than the idea itself. In the end, companies evolve and pivot until they reach a point where everything is right: the product/ service, the market, the brand, the team, and so on.