One of our favorite quotes at BizzVenue is that of Michael Dell: “Ideas are commodity. Execution of them is not.” What is the reason for so many startup failures? Each one of us probably has a different theory, and ours is a lack of proper execution. If a company can make $10,000 in a month selling horse poop, then anything is possible with the right execution.
Go meet the people
That is the simple advice given to Airbnb’s founders when they started at Y Combinator and it changed their path forever. By working with early adapters the founding team was able to understand how to scale their idea. Many experts will tell you time and time again that you can’t put all your eggs in one basket, and that sure isn’t what this message is.
The message is this – using consumers and colleagues as team members is one of the greatest forms of early brainstorming, and an irreplaceable experience. You will always be able to create another line of code. You can update sales tables at any time. One thing you can’t always get is real-time experiences. If it works for Air BnB it should work for all of us.
Adaptation
You’ve got a certain idea and you launch that idea, but at some point, either a competitor or consumers will change something in the way they act, and when that does happen, you have got to be ready to react.
BlackBerry and Nintendo were both industry leaders that failed to adapt to changes in their respected fields. The execution of their business plans went from 100 to 0 in seconds and just like that they went from relevant to irrelevant. Don’t go from black to white overnight, but be sure to have an R&D team that takes pride in their work.
Leadership means courage
The reason that BlackBerry, Nintendo, and early stage startups fail to adapt is not the lack of vision. Entrepreneurs tend to be visionaries. The issue is a lack of courage when it is needed most. Who needs to be courageous? The leader. Being in control can be because of your standing as a founder, or it can be because you make risk your friend (keep your enemies closer to you than your friends).
If the women or men in control are too worried or scared to implement the right changes they should not be leading. A successful startup, like any company or corporation with a winning formula, needs to have a courageous being at the helm or else even the greatest idea won’t matter.
Create a timeline
Having worked at a startup, I can easily say that had the entire team worked intelligently to create attainable milestones at the right time we would have made a right at the fork in the road that lead to success instead of the left that lead to confusion.
Creating a timeline is the key that turns on the fire in the eyes of employees. Entrepreneurs are people who left or chose not to take convenient job offers in order to chase dreams. We are talking about intelligent and adventurous people that like challenges as much as they love their parents.
Find mentors
Successful entrepreneurs learn something new every day. If you were to ask Richard Branson if he tries to enrich himself with new knowledge on a daily basis his answer would of course be yes. According to certain data, startups that participate in accelerators have a higher life-rate and have a higher chance of success – although we did not need the research to think it was true.
Being able to seek advice from a trusted person that has the same interest as you is irreplaceable. Would we like to be able to work with leading web experts and entrepreneurs on a daily basis to execute our vision? You bet, and we are going to do something to make it happen, because if we don’t we won’t be executing our idea with our best game plan.
Identify obstacles
Every startup has their share of obstacles, from funding to legislation to finding the right people to add to your winning team. Instead placing them at the back of your head and remembering them on a rainy day, keep them in your pocket and remember to check in on them every once in a while.
Each obstacle will be attacked with a different route, and therefore you are going to need to sit down, and brainstorm every inch of every obstacle to find the best way to tackle them, because no one wants to or should attack obstacles like Uber.