Your business is only going to be as good as the people who run it. All successful entrepreneurs know that putting together the right team of professionals is one of the most critical steps for any businesses success, while newbie entrepreneurs often try to do it largely alone. Learn to surround yourself with superstars, and you are sure to succeed in any endeavor.
Advice from the Masters – Your Team
A one-man band will never sound as good as an orchestra. It’s highly beneficial to have an advisory board of experts in different fields meaningful to your business.
Donatas Donikar – Author – Start-up Evolution Curve
Are your most talented people working on the biggest opportunities instead of the biggest problems?
Cliff Lerner – Tech Entrepreneur / Author – Explosive Growth
My approach was to hire, train, test, and then fire or promote quickly, so that we could rapidly identify the excellent hires and get rid of the ordinary ones, repeating the process again and again until the percentage of those who were truly great was high enough to meet our needs
Ray Dalio – Author, Billionaire Investor – Principles: Life and Work
The value of exceptional people: Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good…they are 100 times better.
Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook
If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.
Patrick Lencioni – Author – The 4 Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
A person can have the greatest idea in the world—completely different and novel—but if that person can’t convince enough other people, it doesn’t matter.
Carmine Gallo – Author – The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.
Ed Catmull – Author – Creativity, Inc
Recommended Books – Teams
Other concepts on Entrepreneurship
Test Marketing
Often there can be significant differences between our perceptions of what our customers want, and what our customers truly want. Gut and Instinct are often poor predictors of actual consumer demand, as are the encouraging words of our close friends and family. Before you invest significant time, energy and money into developing a product, it is essential that you actually test if people will buy what you are creating.
1000 True Fans
‘1000 true fans’ is a concept that explains why it is not essential to be famous and have a huge following to earn a successful living working on your passion. In fact, all you need are a much smaller set of passionate fans (1000 for example), who become your marketing evangelists and core customers.
Dominate – Don’t Compete
People who truly succeed big, never try to compete – they choose instead to dominate their particular niche and become known as the ‘go-to’ person or company for those specific requirements. Domination allows you to never have to compete on price, not get involved in feature wars and bring along free marketing.
TIM – Time Income Mobility
While the vast majority of people chase money, the ‘new rich’ have learnt the value of finding an optimal balance of TIM (Time, Income & Mobility) instead. There are 2 major advantages of focusing on TIM – (1) Having time and location flexibility, can lead to your money being worth a lot more (2) Time and Location independence can lead to happiness and content, which money simply can’t buy.