Many entrepreneurs fail as CEOs; The results are either closing their business or losing it to someone else

Many entrepreneurs fail as CEOs; The results are either closing their business or losing it to someone else

The 2 secrets to avoid your entrepreneurial failure and become a very successful business leader

• Besides creating the biggest success opportunities for their product or service, entrepreneurs also need to build themselves as business people, salespeople, and the CEOs of their companies. They need to learn how to face customers, media, investors, and other entities in the business world, which they’ve never worked in before.
• Many times that will lead to their failure.
• Here are 2 main secrets of becoming a successful entrepreneurial leader and leading your business to success.

An incredible career shift

• How a University Professor teaching Philosophy becomes a Marine Industry Consultant, YachtBuild Advisor and Yachting Magazine Writer/Editor?
• Phil Friedman was academic teaching philosophy at the university.
• “I felt frustrated and unfulfilled,” Phil told me in an interview for my REACH OR MISS podcast for entrepreneurs; “The abstract nature of philosophic discussions can be daunting. Most of my colleagues with whom I kept in touch over the years have taken on other activities as well, more concrete actions.
• I was very interested in sailing, and I felt attracted to the art and craft of yacht design. So, I studied yacht design by mail, and I ordered several courses from a nearby college in basic structural engineering and mechanical engineering.
• I always had an aptitude for mechanical work and building, and somewhere deep in my background, I had a desire to be a designer. I decided to change the direction of my professional life, and I jumped in with both feet and decided to become a yacht designer and a boat builder.
• After I trained students as a university professor, I decided to go into business for myself.
• Writing for yacht magazines is what enabled me to gain exposure in the market that I wanted to reach.

Most passionate about today

• I’m presently continuing actively as a consultant in the yacht building industry, which I’ve been doing for more than 25 years.
• My latest project is managing a startup in China of two new modern yacht lines for export primarily to the US and Canada.
• I also continue to actively write yachting-related marketing content for both print and digital publishing sectors. After 30 years in these two fields, I thought I’d retire, but my business is surging again. And I don’t mind continuing to work since I really love what I do.”

A mind-blowingTedTalk

There is a fantastic article in Inc. Magazine called,  “How This Leadership Researcher Became the Secret Weapon for Oprah, Pixar, IBM, and Melinda Gates.” It told the story about how Brené Brown’s research launched her into the ranks of leadership gurus.

A few months ago, I watched a TedTalk I found through a post in one of my networks, (or maybe I received a link from someone; I don’t remember). This TedTalk  blew my mind for two reasons:

1st: the speaker was a vulnerable, honest, yet powerful speaker; you immediately wanted to hear more.

2nd: about 20 minutes into this talk, the speaker and researcher came to the conclusion I’d adopted for my professional strategy twenty years earlier;  the irresistible combination of strength, honesty, and vulnerability. Or in other words: Being yourself.

How to be a CEO?

You might wonder what this story has to do with entrepreneurship? Everything.

Recently, I’ve talked about a few startups I’m part of; how I help them build their market strategy and gain as many customers as they can while maximizing their revenue and building their leading brand.

I worked at that time with three brilliant entrepreneurs that invented different, promising solutions while launching their products to the market.

This is challenging because besides creating the biggest success opportunities for their products, they also need to build themselves as business people, salespeople, and the CEOs of their companies. They need to learn how to face customers, media, investors, and other entities in the business world, which they’ve never worked in before.

I saw these people trying to step into the character of what they think a CEO or a business manager should be, and many times it’s ridiculous because they aren’t the character they are trying to be, they are themselves.

Together, we worked on how to dare to be themselves; honest, sometimes vulnerable, yet powerful after fighting the uphill battle of being an entrepreneur.

The business world has completely changed

I’ve been there; in a ‘VP of customers’ position in a medium size company and bored, at the age of 27. Asking myself, how should I behave to come across as serious and authoritarian enough?

However, those days are gone. Entrepreneurships are everywhere; the technology revolution is changing everything – Fin-tech, e-Commerce, Marketing, and more. There aren’t clear rules of “How to behave like a CEO” unless you are a 500 fortune company, which we aren’t.

There are regulations of course, and laws, and the market forces – what the customers are expecting to get and they won’t compromise on.

However, today, more then ever, when everything is so easy to find, and customers expect transparency and honesty – the only way to succeed is to build your entrepreneurial company around the values and systems you (as founders and managers) believe in, and follow that.

The One-of-a-Kind entrepreneurial business

There is an excellent article called “How This Leadership Researcher Became the Secret Weapon for Oprah, Pixar, IBM, and Melinda Gates” from Inc. Magazine tells the story that led Brené Brown to transform from a researcher and a university professor to a TEDex celebrity and best selling author and is the secret weapon for great leaders and leading companies.

“By the end of that year, Brown … figured out how to turn her cult of personality into a sustainable business.”

These 2 secrets;

On the one hand, building your entrepreneurship around the space which you are One-of-a-Kind of, and build your self as the influencer of the market category you created around your unique expertise,

while on the other hand basing your leadership on your unique personality allowing yourself being honest and vulnerable;

Will drive your success.

When I say That in business you always need some factor of luck and we are the ones that are creating and opening the opportunities for this luck to come; These are the two secrets that create this opportunity for luck.

The core idea for entrepreneurs is to create businesses, which create products or services to solve the customer’s problem. However, the only way for them to truly build a sustainable and profitable company around their innovative product is by building their company’s DNA around their own unique characters and perceptions.

They should keep being honest, vulnerable, and powerful, while creating their leading business by being their own “One-of-a-Kind” managers.

Listen to my interview with Phil Friedman in the REACH OR MISS podcast.