Do not hesitate to celebrate any events - the first customer, the first ruble, the first million customers, the first ten million customers. It is important to fix the stages of success in your brain. This is metaphysics. Then success is translated into further growth and development of the organization. If you are not successful, your business is not successful either. If you don't think positively, you don't have what you call positive thinking, it won't work.
You need to concentrate completely, not to disperse.
We need full commitment. I will give an example of an athlete. A professional sportsman and an entrepreneur are basically the same, similar methods and approaches. When a professional athlete prepares for an important start, for the World Championships, Olympics, his self-denial has been brought to an absolute level. I know that many athletes do not have sex for four months each.
They live in the mountains, at the training camp; they only think about the Olympic medal. If you are not focused and sprayed, distracted by trifles, insignificant things - there will never be a success. Therefore, at the startup - I emphasize - in the most difficult first weeks forget about your wife, family, friends, mom, and dad.
Give yourself to the project as much as you can, living them day and night. When the project went and got the first ruble, you can relax and return to normal life. An entrepreneur is foremost a human being, a member of society. You don't have to go crazy, be like Uncle Scrooge, sit in a cellar and count money.
What mistakes should be avoided at the start of the project? The key mistake at the initial stage (and nobody escaped it, including me) is hiring the wrong people. My business practice is full of such cases. You see a business in your own way, life makes adjustments and usually brings disappointments. And only sometimes - charm.
However, it is extremely important to hire people at the beginning: they will run the business, pull it, build it, help you. So try to find the right employees at once.
How not to make a mistake? Don't even try, you will make a mistake. A man is a very strange, peculiar creature. As they say on the Discovery Channel, this is the most dangerous animal in the world. In the top 100, most dangerous animals in the world man are in the first place. His motives are not always clear, they are contradictory.
Just think about it: the most powerful supercomputer ever invented, which emits 1000 watts of heat and consumes a lot of electricity, is not even comparable to 10 percent of the human brain in all parameters! We still think and analyze faster. We breathe, smell, intrigue, etc. Man is a complex substance. Therefore, it is impossible not to make a mistake. It is not geometry or algebra.
Of course, you will be disappointed and mistakes cannot be avoided. Choose the right person - the business will be more successful. Try to see in people the best that is called, clear the grain from the chaff. You will get caught, especially at the initial stage, ass-licking careerists, who will adjust to you.
Stay away from them. You need professionals, workaholics. There will be another category of people - smart managers, bringing significant profits to the project, generating a significant cash flow. They will try to get into the business, offer and often impose themselves as a partner. With intrigue, sabotage and sometimes blackmail. You have to be ready for this.
Such a person should be either taken as a partner or kicked out. Perhaps, in 80 percent of cases, it is necessary to kick out. And in 20 percent to take in partners, not only allocating the fixed compensation but also involved in participation in profit. If, however, he or she "pushes" more and more away from this business, we will have to part with it.
You are lucky people, you live in an era of online life. At the dawn of my becoming an entrepreneur, I did not have such opportunities. Now you can do great things by outsourcing, freelancing people, especially at the initial stage, because you save a lot of money. You don't have to rent an office at all. Your laptop is your office, and you are always in it, even on the beach, even in the mountains. The business which is not generating the well-known fat, cannot afford the big expenses.
The use of online freelancers, new technologies is very important.
Remember, rarely a business that started badly becomes successful.
Mistakes made at the beginning are too expensive. It is better to think over all the details at once so that then it would not be painfully painful and you were not engaged in fixing defects, and the full development of the business.