Harvard business review on Entrepreneurship – Amar Bhide, William A Sahlman, James Mcneil.

Just Do it!

Don’t let your dreams be dreams… While writing about startups and how their time limitation doesn’t allow a single day of losing money, I mentioned startups should be profitable from day one. That can be expanded to all kinds of businesses. That goes very much against our mainstream idea of product development where there is a whole complex process that is necessary to be gone through to reach the product introduction to the market. That is a common case scenario in big corporations and a mistake made often by small companies. In a ideal situation how could that be improved? How could it be that companies could be profitable from day one?

To several individuals looking to be entrepreneurs, the money difficulty sounds like the perfect excuse not to create something. It is obvious that some specific sectors do need until money investment, to name a few: construction, a medical clinic, and so on, while others need absolute nothing invested and can be profitable from day one. A true entrepreneur would say that literally nothing and no business needs money. But what does that really mean?

This is the main discussion topic of the book, that whenever (and no matter which sector) an idea is truly innovative and good, investors can be found to back this idea anyhow. That anyone with no expertise can build something and if that thing is truly innovative and has potential, this individual can be found, investors can be arranged and the idea can turn into something. Not to state the obvious, several are the characteristics associated to “winning” ideas, and those are many times the criteria for investors such as banks to back any project. But even for that solutions exist. That is the case of Angel investors, on which the investment is much more connected to a “chemistry” between the investor and the idea than the reality of facts. Angel investing in this case can be simply connected to the investor seeing the potential of the entrepreneur and even if the idea is not the 100% good, it has incredibly good potential to grow and the person is ready to do it. All reaches to a simple point: The entrepreneur should believe in himself and his idea.

To mention the obvious, the example of Steve jobs is something that needs to show up in cases like that. The most valuable brand in the world was created from nothing, by a hippie guy with no background in technology. If that isn’t an inspiration that nothing needs money to be created that nothing is. From the perspective of the entrepreneur (Jobs) in this case, all the problems had their own solution. In this case his lack of background for dealing with technological products was suppressed by him being able to convince a team of people to do execute his ideas, that alone explains a lot about leadership skills and being able to persuade others to follow your ideas with no resources. Adding more to the list the timing was also important, considering that the computer industry was growing as fast as it could go and Jobs saw the opportunity at the right time. The lack of resources was suppressed by investors seeing the incredibly potential of the company and of the man leading the company. All the billion excuses to anyone, replaced by possible (but difficult) solutions.

The message is, Perseverance is the characteristic of the entrepreneur. Believing on yourself and on your idea, is too much of an asset for any business owner or someone looking to start something. Looking back to our humble beginning in proakatemia, our limited budged (0€) left us limited to believing in our idea, if we didn’t do it, who would? No one. So, start today and Just do it!

Also another thing, no matter how many times you´ve seen this video, its always worth it to see it again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXsQAXx_ao0