Dennis' Blog: December 2016

Original article published on preneurdigest - http://www.preneurdigest.com/famous-entrepreneurs-top-strategies/

By Saheed Oladele - December 7, 2016

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Photo Credit: Pixabay / Ejaugsburg

17 min(s) read

Business Success is an offspring of several strategies and famous entrepreneurs who manage successful businesses have adopted one or more of these strategies.

Unfortunately, not all businesses yield to its applied strategy. Some work out while most don’t.

According to fortune magazine, nine out of ten startups fail.

U.S. Census bureau also reported that 400,000 new businesses are started every year in the USA, but 470,000 are dying.

Do these alarming figures insinuate that there are no successful businesses? Or perhaps, that their figures are extremely negligible? Maybe.

But, does that mean your “striving to succeed” business or startup is about to be among the “nines of tens” as highlighted by fortune magazine?

Or perhaps, among the 470,000 dying businesses as reported by U.S. census bureau? Absolutely not.

Each business has it’s own working strategy for success. This strategy is a function of the type of business, demographics of business, customers behavior, product type, etc.

I said “absolutely not” up there. Yes, that’s right. Why? Because I have varying answers to one of the most common questions asked by small business owners and startup founders…

…what’s the best strategy for business success?

This piece gathers in one place, top strategies adopted by some famous entrepreneurs to grow their businesses.

Hey, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t pick up their quotes somewhere. I took the time to ask each of them what their top strategy is.

They were all asked the same question, “What’s the top strategy for your business’s success?”.

Their responses are arranged in an alphabetically ascending order (A-Z) of the name of each famous entrepreneur.

I hope you’ll gain from it as much as I did. Happy reading!

Top strategies for business success from famous entrepreneurs

Alex Krohn of GTmetrix

Alex is the founder and CEO of GTmetrix

“The best strategy for us was focusing on simplicity. Make it easy for customers to use your product and you make it easy for them to see your value.

From our features, user interface, and organization of data, we strive to deliver something simple to understand, so that their interactions with us feel natural and organic.”

Andrea Loubier of Mailbird

Andrea Loubier is a travel addict, who is obsessed with spicy food. A third culture kid who is crazy passionate about entrepreneurial initiatives for women, improving the unification of online communication and building businesses from the ground up. Andrea is a thought leader for startups founded by brilliant women in Southeast Asia. She is the CEO of Mailbird.

“Hire the right people first and foremost, success is all about the people you hire and how they contribute to the bigger end goal of growing your business into an internationally recognized product and brand that makes people’s lives just a little, or a hell of a lot better.

That is the top strategy, finding the right people for your business. It doesn’t always mean the best, sometimes it means the most motivated, creative, flexible, or adaptable to rapid change. They contribute to the betterment of the entire team, never stop innovating the process, and continue to learn.”

Ashutosh Garg of Guardian Pharmacy

Ashutosh Garg founded Guardian Pharmacy in India in 2003 and grew it to the second largest pharmacy chain in India. He also brought in GNC as a partner to India. He exited from the company he founded in August 2016.

“For any business to succeed, assuming that the business idea is viable and the entrepreneur is well funded, the primary strategy for success is to put together a strong and effective management team.

Good teams have the capability to deliver in tough environments and against all odds that most Startups face in the early days. The entrepreneur has to lead from the front and ensure that the key management team members are managed personally and retained at all cost.”

Brian Halligan of HubSpot

Brian Halligan is Co-founder and CEO of HubSpot, a marketing and sales software company based in Cambridge, MA. He has co-authored two books and teaches at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

“It’s important for today’s founders and CEOs to get up close and personal with customers to better understand their habits and motivations. Find out what motivates customers, where they get news, who they consult for advice, how they shop and buy, and why they ultimately purchase (or don’t).

Next, don’t compromise what you or your company stand for based on the opinion of others — always remain true to your foundational principles. Lastly, above all else, don’t sweat the small stuff — you’re going to make mistakes. Lots of them. As long as you learn from mistakes and course-correct while the problem is still small, it’s all part of the entrepreneurial journey.”

Christopher Gimmer of Snappa

Christopher Gimmer is a marketer and entrepreneur from Ottawa, Canada.Currently, he’s the co-founder and CEO of Snappa

“I don’t think there’s one formula or strategy that guarantees success. I think founders should focus on making daily progress and committing themselves to the journey. As long as you’re continuing to improve and make progress, you can’t lose.”

Cristian Worthington of MondoPlayer

Cristian is a founder of 5 startups with extensive experience in the software industry. Most recently, He is the CEO of MondoTag Inc., a company that has released a revolutionary new video technology that will change the way people discover and share video.

“In every business I’ve owned, there has always been one enduring question, “What are the customers thinking?”. Our job as entrepreneurs is to please our market, which is impossible if we don’t have a solid connection with our customers.

Using social media Content Marketing strategy, we’ve been able to engage our customers in ways we’ve never done before.

People are more likely to send a DM or message on Twitter or Facebook than send an email or make a phone call. The spontaneity of social media makes it the ideal tool for reading the minds of your customers.”

David Schneider of NinjaOutreach

David Schneider is the co-founder of NinjaOutreach, an innovative new Blogger Outreach software for marketers. He writes about business and entrepreneurship and enjoys travel.

“My top strategy is showing up every day and doing my work! Surprising, I know. But in reality, the hardest thing about being an entrepreneur is to show up every day, even on days when things are not going well, and get your work done.

And not just days, but weeks, months, and years. If you show up every day and work hard, you have a much better chance of success.”

Dennis Wagner of TheDennisWagner.com

Top Ranked Business Coach, Consultant, Serial Entrepreneur, Branding, Leadership, Sales, Management, Marketing, Social Media, SEO, Technology, StartUp, Advertising and Small Business Expert. President & CEO at TheDennisWagner. Drone Pilot at PeriscopeTV. Blogger, Contributor and Lifelong student.

“Top business strategy: We always put our clients’ true needs first no matter what. We never try to sell them anything that will not benefit them with a good (ROI) Return On Investment or improve their efficiencies beginning in days or weeks, not months or years.

We treat our clients as we want to be treated. They know this, and it helps us build a mutual trust. That trust is a huge key to success in any business relationship. When people trust you they will do business with you.

We help our clients implement a real-world business process that is proven to work and we have the data to back it up. Business is no longer a guessing game. You don’t throw several different forms of the process against the wall and hope it sticks. We use data to form a plan of action that will work the first time.

We then help the clients implement it into their current business model, we train their staff on the differences in process, explain the benefits, and teach them how to use it to help them be more successful in their day to day workload. No smoke and mirrors, just real techniques, campaigns, training, consulting and a process that works.

It makes it very simple when you put the clients’ need first.”

Gavin Armstrong of Lucky Iron Fish

Dr. Gavin Armstrong is a passionate advocate and activist against hunger and malnutrition, and the Founder and CEO of Lucky Iron Fish, a rapidly growing and widely respected B Corp-certified business.

“Hands down, not letting ourselves be guided by our predispositions and assumptions, and instead, making an effort to fully understand our customers’ needs and behaviors, was a true game-changer for Lucky Iron Fish.

Once we sought the help of trusted third parties in Cambodia to generate buy-in among our consumer base and integrated the fish into our brand and design — a symbol for luck in Cambodian culture — we saw adoption and persistence rates increase significantly.”

Gavin Edley of Vitalife Group

Gavin Edley is CEO of Vitalife Group, which includes Vitalife Health and Love Health Hate Waste. He also owns GavinEdley and the Udemy course ‘Fast Track Entrepreneur: Start Your Own Online Business’ – both of which are designed to help people start and grow their own business from scratch.

“Be adaptable. At the start of our business, I was quite idealistic in thinking I could impose my own plans and business direction on the market, but I learned very quickly that your business strategy had to adapt to the market.

Don’t be precious about your plans when starting out, expect them to change quickly, and be prepared to alter them in order to survive and thrive.”

Jeet Banerjee of JeetBanerjee

Jeet Banerjee is a 23-year-old serial entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, digital marketing consultant, and best-selling author.

“My top strategy is delegation. It’s tough for many business owners to put others in charge of tasks, but you have to know your strengths and weaknesses as an entrepreneur.

Find the things you’re great at and focus your time on that and delegate other areas of your businesses to other individuals who are great at it. By doing this, you put yourself in a position to grow faster and accomplish so much more.”

Marc Guberti of MarcGuberti

Marc Guberti is an 18-year-old entrepreneur, social media expert, and CEO of MarcGuberti.

“Social media is my business’ strong suit. My approach is to provide massive value on a consistent and frequent basis. When people reply to my posts, I reply back. Interaction is my golden rule. I interact with as many people in my audience as I can, and I’ll also interact with like-minded people outside of my audience.

These people then go to my social media profiles, learn more about what I do, and start reading through my content. I promote my landing page at least once per day depending on the social network to develop the relationship further. I constantly ask myself how I can grow my email list from my social media efforts.”

Mark Babbitt of YouTern

Mark Babbitt is the founder and CEO of YouTern.

“The strategy that has been the biggest difference maker for my businesses? Building community.

In today’s marketplace, no one wants to hear what you say about your business. Instead, they want to hear from your employees and existing customers. And some of the most influential organizations today are aligning those potential brand ambassadors in a community bonded by a common purpose.

From within those communities comes objective input about your product or service and innovative ideas that help your business compete. More importantly, members of the community become advocates of your brand by providing testimonials online.

Welcome to the ‘Testimonial Economy.'”

Nicolas Cole of NicolasCole

Nicolas Cole is an author, columnist for Inc Magazine, entrepreneur, and speaker. He has had work published in TIME, Forbes, Fortune, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, The Huffington Post, and more. He is a Top Writer on Quora with over 14,000,000 total views and is best known for writing about self-improvement.

“Give first and ask the third. I have been extremely fortunate to have built an incredible following online, and collaborated with some of the most well-known entrepreneurs and thought leaders in various industries.

And the reason for that is because I have always offered to share my own knowledge and extend my own network first. By looking for ways to provide value out the gate, people respond much more willingly than if you walk around asking people for things. It’s about giving. Give, give, give, and then find ways to collaborate that are mutually beneficial.”

Niraj Ranjan Rout of Hiver

Niraj is the founder of Hiver, an app that turns Gmail into a powerful customer support and collaboration tool. He works on programming, customer support and sales, and also contributes to design and UI.

“I would say one of the most important, yet often overlooked, success strategy is pure design thinking. The more your product decisions are generated from the thoughts and insights of your users, the more useful those decisions are going to be.

We hit the market with just a skeletal idea for Hiver and we used the data, feedbacks, and reviews from our initial set of customers to refine our product and add new features. This way of using design thinking and empathetic reasoning to constantly improve your product allows you to focus your efforts on building a solution that is actually needed by your customers, instead of building whatever and throwing it out into the market. It does wonders for your ROI as well.”

Richard Sheridan of Menlo Innovations

Rich Sheridan is the CEO of Menlo Innovations.

“When Simon Sinek delivered his famous “start with why” talk we realized we had danced on this dance floor for years, but were never fully specific about our why. We would eventually get to our why but we never started with why. When we did, it changed everything.We began speaking about a culture intentionally focused on the business value of joy, and that our joyful focus was external to the company, our

We began speaking about a culture intentionally focused on the business value of joy, and that our joyful focus was external to the company, our why was to end to human suffering in the world as it relates to technology by bringing joy back to the world of software design and development.

In December 2013, when my book Joy, Inc. hit the shelves, my talks around the world, and the visitor counts of people who make the trek to see our culture in action went through the roof. Now 3,000 to 4,000 people a year come to spend anywhere from 2 hours to five days studying us, learning from us, and engaging us to help us bring joy to their work cultures.

This is all fostered by a very intentional culture of storytelling where each story captures and retells a view of our systematic, structured and energizing way to deliver quality and delight to our clients who engage us to design and develop their software product or service. Now the fastest-growing parts of our business are cultural transformation initiatives from some of the largest companies on the planet.”

Sally Elbassir of Passport & Plates

Sally has been a traveler from the start. She boarded her first flight when she was just 10 days old and hasn’t stopped traveling since. She’s a firm believer that local food and travel experiences are the best forms of education. Sally shares her adventures and tips on Passports & Plates.

“As a blogger, I have to wear many hats. I’m my own content creator, marketer, business developer, and financial expert. Project management tools have been crucial in helping me organize my time and to-do list.

It’s easy to get lost in a never-ending to-do list, but by separating and prioritizing my project, I’m able to get urgent items done as soon as possible and save (or even outsource) less urgent items for later.”

Sam Hurley of OPTIM-EYEZ

Sam Hurley, Founder of OPTIM-EYEZ.

“My top strategy for success is building relationships. Without them, you will struggle. With them, your business will flourish.

Make the right connections with the right minds at the right time and actually invest in these people. In return, they will be more than willing to help you out when you need them. Business isn’t easy – but a solid network takes you to heights you would never have once imagined.”

Scott Eddy of MrScottEddy

Scott Eddy is from Miami, ex-stockbroker, now top 10 social media influencer for the travel industry.

“Be completely transparent. That goes for your business strategy with employees and clients. The transparency will carry over into your success.

Make it known that transparency goes for everyone. From the CEO down, it is a two-way communication street. When you implement it throughout the entire company, it becomes more about teamwork than about a focus on any one individual.”

Sean Smith of SimpleTiger

Sean is ‎Co-Founder, COO & Consultant at SimpleTiger LLC

“I’m convinced that the tighter you hold on to things, the worse they fall apart. That being said, hire when you’re exhausted, hire where you feel the biggest friction is, and let the person you hire have the autonomy to adjust that role and make the processes surrounding that role better.

This has been massive for us, and the growth of SimpleTiger.”

Sujan Patel of Web Profits

Sujan Patel is the co-founder of Web Profits, a growth marketing agency helping companies leverage the latest and greatest marketing strategy to fuel their businesses. He has over 13 years of internet marketing experience and has led the digital marketing strategy for companies like Sales Force, Mint, Intuit and many other Fortune 500 caliber companies.

“My top strategy is to work my butt off. Being an entrepreneur, you have your wins and losses, and neither come easy. Most entrepreneurs I see simply don’t work hard enough to see their ideas or dreams come true (or fail at it). So work hard, focus on executing and when you fail, because you will fail, get back up and keep going.”

So work hard, focus on executing, and when you fail because you will fail, get back up and keep going.”

Tim Hughes of Digital Leadership Associates

Tim Hughes is the co-founder of Digital Leadership Associates

“The top strategy is… To get close to your customer. Understand their wants and needs and personalize a service around it. Customers are also a great source of innovation, one of the services we offer, was suggested to us by a prospect and we now offer that to other companies.”

Warren Whitlock of WarrenWhitlock

Warren Whitlock is a digital business development strategist. He is the host of Social Media Radio and speaks frequently about social media marketing, online publicity and marketing, social networking and building lifetime value for rapid growth. He was also named one of Forbes’ Top 10 Social Media Power Influencers of 2013.

“Most entrepreneurs I meet are lacking in math and accounting skills.

Make sure you set goals with numbers that you know you can measure. Learn enough accounting to know the difference between revenues, gross profit, net profit, fixed and incremental costs.

Most important. Estimate the lifetime value of customer and cost of acquisition. You can always increase the value over time, but you won’t be around if you can’t pick up new customers at a profit.”

Wendy Keller of Keller Media

Wendy Keller is the CEO and Senior Literary Agent at Keller Media. Keller Media Inc. sells good books to major publishers worldwide. Having a good idea for a book is one thing. The agency has sold +1200 books since 1989, including 16 New York Times best sellers and 9 international best sellers.

“My “Top” Strategy: Listen harder. Ask more questions. Take — and review — your notes. Listening with your ears and guts will help you decide with whom you should — and how far you can take them toward their own goals; it will help you notice trouble (or troubled) clients before you get in too far to exit; it will help you give people exactly what they want in the way that they want it.”

Final thought on the top strategies for business success shared by famous entrepreneurs

In summary, as the famous entrepreneurs have revealed; resilience, transparence, determination, full customers’ understanding, simplicity, task delegation, consistently creating value, networking, pure design thinking, building a community, accounting skills, creating a to-do list, hard work, flexibility, outsourcing where and when neccesary, careful listening, teamwork, and continuity are top strategies for business success.

Apply these strategies and pilot your business to the dream land.

PS: If you found this post useful, kindly use the share button(s) to help someone else out there. Cheers!

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Business Success: 24 Famous Entrepreneurs Share their Top Strategies