A year and a half ago in a late hour, I received a phone call from an entrepreneur whom I worked with two years earlier. He was very concerned and told me that the investors he was negotiating with for more than a year, decided to redraw from the agreement.

It was an investment of a few million dollars he needed for starting the production, marketing, and sales stages of their innovative product aiming to help disabled people.

They worked ten years on the development of this groundbreaking new product.

I invited him to meet on the next morning to try and think together of his options and what his next step should be.

When we met on the next morning, I told him I know only one way to raise money for a business – from customers. I eleven instead of trying to raise another fund and since the product was ready for production – he should start selling!

I remember sitting at one of the most fascinating (that, with time was found as a life-changing) speaking event at the Social Media Marketing World conference of 2017. Mark Schafer presented his new book Known. I wrote here a few times about the idea of how any expert can become known in their field of expertise.:

“When I wrote my last book, Known, it was about how creating an effective, powerful personal brand is really the only sustainable, competitive advantage we can have. I was addressing the question: Could anybody become known?”

I thought about this book when I interviewed my latest podcast’s guest Phil Friedman.

Phil decided to stop being frustrated as a university professor teaching philosophy and made a career shift, studied yacht design and basic structural and mechanical engineering. He then entered the marine industry as a yacht builder, boat and shipyard manager, small-business and start-up advisor, and yachting writer and editor.

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.

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. 

Read how these 4 successful entrepreneurs managed to use their biggest failure to reach their remarkable ongoing success

Over the last twelve years of working with entrepreneurs, the issue of the high percentage of entrepreneurship failures became a major discussion. The way of managing entrepreneurship using a “trial and error” mindset became conceivable.
Suddenly, it seems like entrepreneurs don’t have to fit the criteria of a small business to succeed and to gain profits, return investment, and loans.
Instead, many startups are focusing mainly on raising money (that isn’t theirs), and it is okay to fail. There is much less obligation to succeed than any other small business.