5 Secret Ingredients Of Successful Female Entrepreneurs
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5 Secret Ingredients Of Successful Female Entrepreneurs – If you ask any number of entrepreneurs the question “What are the keys to success?”, you’ll likely get as many different answers as the number of entrepreneurs your query.
Because while successful entrepreneurs share many of the same attributes, each has taken his/her own unique path to reach their level of success.
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And so, their ideas of what has been most important in making them successful will naturally vary.
Here, we offer you our thoughts on 5 essential elements for being a success in business, especially as a female entrepreneur.
5 Secret Ingredients Of Successful Female Entrepreneurs
by guest writer Kimberly Clay
This is (obviously) not a definitive list, but a short list of important elements we’d like to share to help you in your own success journey.
Master the art of patience
I have always been a calm person, but not an especially patient one.
In years past, once I had made a decision or chosen a particular path or direction, I wanted to zoom forward at 100 miles an hour.
It didn’t matter that I didn’t have all the tools I needed. It didn’t matter that I didn’t really have a plan in place. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t collected the needed resources.
What was important to me was that I didn’t waste time (what in the world does that even mean when you’re young!), and got started as soon as possible (as if I was racing someone and there was a huge prize to be won for getting “there” first).
Needless to say, I experienced my share of completely unnecessary fails because I hadn’t learned patience.
As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and when you’re building a business, doesn’t matter what kind, you need to play the long game.
This doesn’t mean you should have no sense of urgency. Urgency certainly has its place, especially in terms of keeping motivated to move forward or push things through.
However, you don’t start a business one day, and expect thirty days later to have a huge, profitable and successful enterprise.
Even with previous experience in your chosen niche, it takes time to plan, to set things up, to test, to present your business to the market, to test, to test again and so on.
Learning patience early on allows you to settle in, focus your time, efforts and resources strategically, to make needed adjustments, and to focus on the “big picture”.
Be willing to examine and understand your mistakes
A lot of us are still under the mistaken notion that we will not make mistakes, or if we do, it’s an indication that we’ve chosen or acted poorly.
And while mistakes obviously indicate a problem somewhere, they are also very much a normal part of the process of business building.
The best thing to do is to first realize that there will be mistakes. Period. End of story.
And second, to plan for your mistakes by putting a system in place to deal with them.
That way, when mistakes occur or problems arise (and they always do), you are not caught so off guard, and you are in a position to review the situation, come to understand the mistake or problem, and learn from it quickly.
Then, you make the needed correction and put in place a form of action to prevent that same mistake from happening again.
Begin making connections early and often
In the beginning of my own entrepreneurial journey, I sucked at this.
One, because I am a life-long introvert and have always found initiating personal contacts and relationships excruciatingly painful.
And two, because I used to look at business in terms of adversarial relationships (i.e. beating out, or at the very least, fiercely competing against any perceived competition).
To be perfectly honest, it has only been in recent years, with the huge influx of successful women coming into the blogging, online marketing and entrepreneurial space, that I began to see an exponential growth of collaborative business relationships that were structured much differently than what I was used to.
As well as come to truly understand the value of these new types of relationships.
Without going into detail here because we would be here a long time, these female-based relationships were much more about working together to share, support and encourage one another. Not just profit from each other.
Don’t get me wrong, I am fully aware of cooperation and collaboration in business that has been around for millennia among large corporations and such.
But in terms of small business, sole proprietorships, and I’m especially talking about the early days of online enterprises, the model (at least in my personal experience) was much more often one of competitiveness rather than collaboration.
But what I have since discovered is that forging relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs, especially other women, can prove invaluable.
Whether it’s:
- Learning helpful techniques
- Sharing ideas
- Participating in a problem-solving group
- Getting helpful advice from others who have experienced your circumstances
- Or expanding your pool of opportunities
…connections are truly invaluable to the entrepreneur.
I have formed a small circle of other women bloggers, writers and entrepreneurs at various levels of success whose insight, advice, and encouragement has helped me immensely on my journey.
Simply talking to someone or a group of individuals who have the capacity to understand your situation or not think your ideas are some kind of lunacy, is extremely comforting and beneficial.
As well, this helps you to have the courage and confidence to move forward.
[adsense]Hold yourself accountable, but don’t wait on perfect
If you want to be successful in business, especially as an entrepreneur, you have to hold yourself responsible for planning and preparing for your venture as best you can to give yourself the best chance at success.
But at some point, you have to do the work. Period.
If you want to build something, create something, it doesn’t get done by simply thinking about it or planning for it. At some point, somebody’s got to do something.
But don’t wait for everything to be perfect and in place before you get started because that may never happen.
Be as thorough and ready as you can possibly be before stepping into the arena, but at some point, you have to make a move, get started.
Do the work.
Learn from others
There are lessons all around that can help teach you how to be successful in business:
- The current day’s news
- The latest Apple rollout (how do they keep getting people to buy those gazillion dollar phones!)
- Marketing messages you receive every day in your email inbox
- The local business in your community celebrating 30 years in business (what are they continuing to do right that their customers love so much?)
The lessons for being a successful entrepreneur are plentiful and free.
Can you get all the tools you need to start or run your business in this way?
Of course not, but there is so much information available these days, it’s crazy not to take advantage of it. (YouTube anyone?)
Look around! Learn from others’ successes and failures. Save the time and expense of having to endure more (sometimes many more) setbacks of your own.
Your job is to be receptive and intuitive enough to find the lessons.
If you shorten your learning curve as much as possible and learn faster what does or doesn’t work, it only benefits you!
So there you have them, our five secrets to entrepreneurial success.
Hopefully, they have sparked some thoughts and ideas relative to your personal journey in business that may help you as you go forward.
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Kimberly Clay is the founder and creative force behind WhatSheSay.com, a lifestyle, self-improvement and personal development blog for women. She is passionate about helping other individuals, especially women, to build better lives with confidence – get unstuck, be inspired and get motivated to live their best lives.
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