Tag Archives: educational programmes in entrepreneurship

Blog, Skills Development

6 ways to find a co-founder

Co-founders are normally people involved in the initial launch of startup companies. Anyone can be a co-founder, but frequently co-founders are entrepreneurs, engineers, hackers, funders, web developers, web designers and others involved in the ground level of a new  venture.   The first step in finding your co-founder is to map yours needs.  Make sure you are perfectly clear on what skillsets/resources will be the most important for the success of the startup, and best fill a hole in your own resume and desired management team.

    1. Friends from University – It worked for the guys at Facebook and Google, so just get out and meet other students.
    2. Former co-workers – If you’ve worked together as employees, you might be able to work together as co-founders. You have the history and know each others skill sets.
    3. People you meet over coffee – We see hot beds of startups co-locating themselves in coffee shops, just talk to the guy next to you.
    4. Former co-founders in another venture – There’s no better person to launch with than someone that has started a company before.
    5. Accelerators – Related to some of the other co-working suggestions, simply applying to a startup accelerator can lead to finding a co-founder.
    6. At meet-ups – Tech Meetups are great places to find co-founders and they are easy to find and also go to.
Blog, Data Analytics, Enterprise Education

What skills do you need to be a successful Entrepreneur?

When starting a business, we all come at from different directions, at different ages, different backgrounds. There are so many skills required to run your own startup. Successful Entrepreneur skills, are the ones you’ll need to run everything from serving customers to preparing your accounts. Below are listed 13  core skills required in running a startup business and how you might develop your core skill set further. The successful Entrepreneur skills are:

  1. Opportunity Recognition – The recognition of new markets and opportunities, such as a new customers’ need is core to becoming a successful entrepreneur.
  2. Ideation – Ideation is the creative process of generating, developing, and communicating new ideas. Always write your ideas down in a book and come back to them when you can do something about it.
  3. Research & Analysis – This involves both qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis. Understanding the customers, competitors and costs structure are important in making a startup work.
  4. Resources Identification – Working out the resource requirements then leads to determining what types of resources you will need to start-up and operate your startup.
  5. Risk Analysis – This process of defining and analysing the dangers to your startup business posed by potential natural and human-caused events.
  6. Tactical Planning – As a startup the horizon is low, so focus on this process of outlining business plans for the coming year. This differs from strategic planning as strategic planning encompasses longer-term goals that reflect the company’s direction and its purpose outlined in its mission statement.
  7. Operational Design – Operational design is the first level of strategy implementation and rests upon operational art. This cognitive approach uses your skill, knowledge, experience, creativity, and judgment to develop operations to organise and employ the resources available.
  8. Business Modelling – A business model is the map of how a startup generates revenue and makes a profit from its value proposition. From this a business plan and processes may be derived.
  9. Cash Flow – In the early days of a business maintaining a healthy cash level, liquidity ensure the business survives. Cash is king.
  10. Team Building – As a new business building a team is important, which requires various types of activities used to enhance social relations and define roles within team are developed and maintained.
  11. Branding – Branding is one of the most important aspects of any business, it develops you icon and a connection with your suppliers, customers and financial stakeholders.
  12. Marketing – The communications of you value proposition should generate leads which can be turned into sales.
  13. Negotiating & Selling – Getting the right prices from your suppliers and selling at the right price is fundamental for a startup to grow. These skills go hand in hand together.
Blog, Enterprise Education, Skills Development, Venture Capital and Funding

7 obstacles experienced by entrepreneurs

As an entrepreneur we have lots of do, but sometimes we just do it wrong, we let obstacles get in our way. So what are the typical obstacles we entrepreneurs have to deal with:

  1. Perfectionism – For entrepreneurs, practice doesn’t make perfect; action does. You simply cannot wait until you are 100 percent ready before you take action. Think MVP.
  2. Procrastination –  Sometimes its easier to delay the decision, the action or even dealing with the problem, so each day “Eat the Frog” and take action of the real issues within your business.
  3. Fear – Entrepreneurs’ resolve is tested from the very first step of starting a business. In fact, one entrepreneur compared starting a business to jumping off a cliff and assembling your parachute on the way down.
  4. Worry – As an entrepreneur, worry comes with the territory. In fact, over a third of entrepreneurs told Gallup they worried a lot about yesterday. While worry is a quotidian experience, it is not productive. You have to make peace with the things that concern you, and not let them stop you from taking action and pursuing your dreams.
  5. Financing – Experienced entrepreneurs don’t have it easy when it comes to funding a new business, but they do have a few advantages over newcomers. They might have a pool of capital from a business they previously sold or a steady stream of revenue they can use to fund a new business’s cash flow.
  6. Team building – This is especially hard if you’ve never run or managed a team before, but even if you have management experience, picking the right team for a startup is stressful and difficult. It’s not enough to find candidates who fill certain roles — you also need to consider their cost to the business, their culture fit and how they’ll work as part of your overall team. Such considerations are exceptionally hard when you’re under the pressure of filling those positions as soon as possible.
  7. Decision-making – Believe it or not, this is probably the most stressful challenge on this list. New entrepreneurs are forced to make hundreds of decisions a day, from big, company-impacting decisions, to tiny, hour-affecting ones. Decision fatigue is a real phenomenon, and most new entrepreneurs will experience it if they aren’t prepared for the new level of stress.
Blog, Resources, Venture Capital and Funding

5 Sources of funding to start a business

If you are looking to fund your startup and not sure where to start? Here is a quick guide to five potential sources of funding for your small business. I have tried to put them in order with the best way first:

    1. Bootstrapping: Many billionaire entrepreneurs find a way to grow without external financing so that financiers don’t control their destinies or grab a disproportionate slice of the business.
    2. Customers: Advance payments from customers can give you the cash you need, at a relatively low cost, to keep your business growing. Advances also demonstrate a level of commitment by the customer to your operation.
    3. Friends and family members:  If you’re lucky, friends and family members might be the most lenient investors of the bunch. They don’t tend to make you pledge your house, and they might even agree to sell their interest in your company back to you for a nominal return.
    4. Startup Loans: Start Up Loans is a government-funded scheme that fund your startup and mentors entrepreneurs. They have a series of delivery partners  who will help you develop a business plan.
    5. Bank loans:  Banks are like the supermarket of debt financing. They provide short-, mid- or long-term financing, and they finance all asset needs, including working capital, equipment and real estate. However, they typically are not the first place to look for funds for your startup.

When taking loans to fund your startup from friends and family, banks or another you must, have a written agreement covering every last detail regarding the loan. This includes the loan amount, the repayment period, the amount of each repayment instalment, the interest rate if any, consequences of non-repayment etc.  If in doubt get a lawyer to help you.

Blog, Experiential Learning, Legal and Regulatory Knowledge, Skills Development

Why is student led enterprise so important?

It is universal accepted by policy-makers, businesses and academics that entrepreneurship is an essential skill for the survival and advancement of both large and small businesses. Therefore, an important skill to obtain whilst at university or college. There is also strong evidence exists that educational programmes in entrepreneurship have a positive effect on developing individuals’ entrepreneurial attributes (The Impact of Entrepreneurship Education on Entrepreneurial Intention), raising awareness of career options in entrepreneurship and advancing a positive attitude towards entrepreneurship.

However, its in the extra curricular activities that the students mindset is developed, through empowerment, self actualization and the further development of the entrepreneurial mindset. This is bore out with the wikipida definition of Entrepreneurship which is the act and art of being an entrepreneur or one who undertakes innovations or introducing new things, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods.

This means that the development of the entrepreneur is through experimentation, the tried and tested process of trial and error, with reflection and fine running at each stage. Never giving up but also taking a clear judgment of the progress and opportunities. This was presented by Peter Honey and Alan Mumford’s model (based on David Kolb’s model of experiential learning  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles).

This is why student led societies are so important in the development of enterprise within our universities and colleges.  If we list of attributes of an entrepreneur we can start to see why Societies are great places for the development of these skills and why employers should be looking for these students.

1. Ambition. Society leaders not only want to be successful, they need to be successful, driven by the ambition they put in 70 hour weeks. They are obsessed by their sports, the goals of the society (RAG, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rag_%28student_society%29) and also driven to ensure they will leave the society in better shape than any previous leader.

2. Persistence. Failure is not an option. However learning from your mistakes, failures and the continual persistence to drive forward to create a winning team. I see societies such as the Eco-House Initiative (http://www.ecohouseinitiative.org/ who gained RBS ESSA Accreditation) who are trying to fix major world problems whilst still a student society.

3. Creativity. Solving problems is the name of the game. Developing solutions for life’s problems creates opportunities , if its trying to run five minibuses for the team, developing a speaker series (http://manchesterentrepreneurs.org.uk/events) of successful entrepreneur on no budget or organizing twenty committee members to be in one place.

4.  Tenacity. Everyone learns to the walk the same way, you try to stand, fall over, try again, fall over again and continue with this, many many times until you get it right. You know you will succeed, everyone around you walks. So just be stubborn and get on with it. Again sports teams know this, other societies learn it over a period of time.

5. Risk tolerance. Life is full of risks, we survive by learning to gauge, understand and control these to an acceptable level. However, it’s the tolerance to risk which is personal, some people like to take larger risks than others. So standing for president of a society may be too risky for some, as failure and ridicule are too much to handle. Others will see this as an opportunity to promote themselves and get to know a wider social circle which ensures the have a more powerful network. The management of the society also handles risk as any other business, and this learning within a society is invaluable when applied to business.

6. Personality. People like people who like them, so developing your personality whilst at university is, some will say the only reason, the main reason to go to university. Whilst some of the most successful entrepreneurs are geeks, the majority of successful people have a great personality, which engages others. In most societies the leaders are voted in and therefore presenting and conveying your personality is important for a successful outcome.

7. Communications. In a worlds with several social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, pin interest, Youtube..) and emails coming in from all directions, the average student is very difficult to get hold of. The importance is understanding the medium which works with your community and putting in a way your audience understands.

8. Leadership. While an entrepreneurial leader organizes and assumes the risk of his or her society, there will likely be others who follow to help make the society a success, typically a management team. Managing members and key team members is an important ingredient for a successful entrepreneur. Motivating the team to take 400 students on a skiing trip (http://theessa.com/case-study/skum-2/#.UV6aFxlAuBU) might sound easy but the research, planning, resource allocation and responsibility can not be under estimated.

9. Adaptability. The average society has around 200 members from numerous schools which run their own timetable. Change is inevitable and is the only constant in an evolving world. An entrepreneur leader will adapt to technology, market trends, financial pressures and their customers/members. Those that have tried to organize students will know that adaptability is the core skill.

10. Intuition. Understanding the trends and having an idea of what people want without doing a market survey (Steve Jobs never did one market survey) will allow our entrepreneurial leader to have a vision which others can only buy-in to and also have to follow.

This is why being part of a society is so important in developing student enterprise and also creating an entrepreneurial environment for students to learn and tune these valuable skills. Enterprise Societies can help create this space for student reflection on their extra curricular activities.