The Five Rules for Entrepreneurs

A few days ago, I got this inspiring email on 'the Five Rules for Entrepreneurs' from my mentor Brian Tracy, one of the most influential motivational speakers in the world today.  Brian Tracy is a professional speaker and a best-selling author on personal development, sales, entrepreneurship and leadership; an entrepreneur and a success expert.

I found the content so rich that I couldn’t help sharing it with you. He has summarized this topic in a way I couldn’t. Here is the email:

Hello Chibuikem,

Entrepreneurship is the art of finding profitable solutions to problems. Every successful entrepreneur or business person has been able to identify a problem and come up with a solution to it before someone else did. Here are the five rules for success.

1. Find a Need and Fill It

Human needs and wants are unlimited. Therefore, the opportunities for entrepreneurship and financial success are unlimited as well. The only constraint on the business opportunities available to you are the limits you place on your own imagination.

2. Find a Problem and Solve It

Wherever there is a widespread and unsolved customer problem, there is an opportunity for you to start and build a successful business.

Once upon a time, before photocopies, the only way to type multiple copies of a letter was with carbon paper places between sheets of stationary. But a single mistake would require the typist to go through and erase the mistakes on every single copy. This was enormously clumsy and time consuming.

Then a secretary working for small company in Minneapolis began mixing flour with nail varnish in order to white out the mistake she was making in her typing. Soon, people in other offices began asking for it. The demand became so great that she quit her job and began working full-time manufacturing what she called “Liquid Paper.” A few years later, the Gillette Corporation came along and bought her out for $47 million cash.

3. Unlimited Opportunities

There are problems everywhere. Your job is to find one of these problems and solve it better than it has been solved in the past. Find a problem that everyone has and see if you can’t come up with a solution for it. Find a way to supply a product or service better, cheaper, faster, or easier. Use your imagination.

4. Focus on the Customer

The key to success in business is to focus on the customer. Become obsessed with your customer. Become fixated on your customer’s wants, needs, and desires. Think of your customer all the time. Think of what your customer is willing to pay for. Think about your customer’s problems. See yourself as if you were working for your customer.

5. Bootstrap Your Way to Success

Once you have come up with a problem or idea, resolve to invest your time, talent, and energy instead of your money to get started. Most great personal fortunes in the United States were started with an idea and with the sale of personal services.

Most great fortunes were started by people with no money, resources, or backing. They were started by individuals who came up with an idea and who then put their whole heart into producing a product or service that someone else would buy.

Action Exercise

Look for business opportunities everywhere, develop, an entrepreneurial mind-set, and continually be open and curious about the needs not satisfied and problems not solved.

One idea is all you need to make your first million.

To making a million,

Brian Tracy

Thank you for finding time to read this article, I hope you were inspired.

You might also want to read my other articles on the Seven Proven Steps To Setting and Achieving Any Goal, The 23 Things Every Entrepreneur Must Know,  Making Meetings More Efficient in 7 Practical Steps.

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