Entrepreneurs fail when they stop [or don’t start] listening to their customers’ wants and needs

Entrepreneurs fail when they stop [or don’t start] listening to their customers’ wants and needs

Kevin L. Jackson, a globally recognized Cloud Computing Expert, Thought Leader, Industry Influencer and Founder/Author of the award-winning “Cloud Musings” blog, and a “Top 5G Influencer.”

Kevin shared with me his biggest failure, and not surprisingly, it was about… marketing.

“I started Gov Cloud Networks in 2013,” Kevin told me in our interview on my REACH OR MISS podcast. “After I retired from the Navy, I worked as a corporate executive for many years. During that time, I proved my expertise in applying advanced technology to seminal intractable business challenges. That often led to the development of Nobel Internet Phased Information Brokerage Businesses Models that would interact with mobile devices.

 I was doing a lot of work with the military, the government, and the intelligence community; they were the only people that had these large global networks and had the money and the urgency to actually build and deploy the solutions that I was thinking of. 

 But eventually, all that turned into Cloud Computing, and my ideas became commercially buyable.”

If you want the whole story of the poor success rates among entrepreneurs, there isn’t a better story than Kevin’s story. That’s because Kevin wasn’t a young entrepreneur that had never worked in a corporation before. He was a successful Navy Crier Pilot with many years in executive positions in leading corporates. And yet, he failed:

 

“Entrepreneurs fail for not listening to their customers. In fact, when I first started Gov Cloud Network I was exactly like that, I thought I have a great idea, I know how to leverage this technology, and all I have to do is go out and tell everybody what I can do, and I will be successful. That was my idea, tell everyone how good I was and make money.

Days after I quit my last full-time job, I got a lucrative contract. But two months after that, I lost the contract because I wasn’t listening to my customer. After that, I got a couple more clients, but the revenue wasn’t enough to pay all my bills. So, I had to go back to the 9 to 5 job with lower pay while I was building my business part time on the side. Eventually I got enough clients to quit the other job and focus on Gov Cloud.

The lesson I learned was never to stop listening to your customers. The first client I lost told me afterward, “Although your idea was great, you didn’t take into account our specific environment, our specific needs, our specific wants.”

That got me into social media that enabled me to listen to the entire marketplace, not just a single client. The result was that we focused on building a very strong bidirectional social media presence that allowed us to have a continuous conversation with the marketplace.”

 

This is the full story.

Yes, Kevin fell into the same trap almost any entrepreneur falls into (I told about my failure a few times in my podcast and blog. And I was a global and local marketer for more than 20 years before I opened my entrepreneurship).

The difference between Kevin and 95% of the entrepreneurs was that because of his vast experience and successful management history, he only failed once. Then he went to do his homework, understood the lesson, and opened his entrepreneurship as his main business again.

The second time, he was greatly successful!

Before ending my post, I must share with you Kevin’s answer when I asked him what his One Key Success Factor was:

“My answer might surprise you,” Kevin said. “It’s my three children that taught me what the important things in life are, and that you can never stop being a parent.

When I take it to business, it is never to forget your business partners and never stop thinking about helping your clients.” 

“There is a mountain that we call life,” Kevin told me at the end of the interview when I asked him if he ever claimed a mountain, “that we always have to be climbing and I think it’s important never to give up climbing on the mountain of life. Keep climbing.”

 

For the last 12 years, I researched the reasons behind entrepreneurs’ tremendously high failure percentages. I worked with more than 120 entrepreneurial businesses and, together with them, created a method that works for entrepreneurs.

I combined between the very successful marketing and sales approaches of traditional marketing, and the innovative entrepreneurial method that is a must for a business success today.

In a free masterclass that I’m holding this week, I share this program of actionable steps for entrepreneurial business success.

I’ll be very happy to see you there.

Find out more here…