The Five Keys to Business Success

I am a big believer of chronicling best practices and lessons learned in the field of entrepreneurialism. 

Why? Because fundamental truths, when they reveal themselves, can save you from painful dead-end paths, minimize the time you spend re-creating the wheel and generally translate to a higher probably of success – regardless of industry, stage of business or outcome goals.

The paradox, however, is that there are so many nuggets that one encounters over time, across companies and at different milestones of a business that sometimes the real challenge is to just keep things simple enough to be manageable.

By that, I mean that the definition of the situation can be clearly and consistently communicated to all members of your constituency audience (which includes customers, partners, investors and employees).

Put another way, as my Bikram yoga teacher likes to say, “If you come across two philosophy books, one thin and the other thick, choose the thin one, as the author of the thick one still has more work to do.”

With that in mind, the five most important drivers that I have found to entrepreneurial success are:

1. Embrace Specifics: the company culture is to sweat the details (and document them) about the target customer, use cases, product requirements, development schedules, customer support assumptions, business models, market penetration strategy and the competitive landscape.
2. Be Reality Driven: the team is intellectually honest about the definition of the situation and strives to create clear metrics and measure actual performance relative to stated goals to objectively prove out the core assertions of the business.
3. Reconcile Paradoxes: there is an understanding and intellectual accommodation of the fact that the path to business success is replete with short-term versus long-term trade-offs, most notably conflicting agendas between your constituent base.
4. Practice Clock Management: the plan of record is based on a fundamental alignment on how much time is allocated to achieve specific milestones, the available resources, especially cash, to achieve those milestones and fall-back options if goals are not timely met.
5. Mentally Tough Hires: the foundation of the team is built around a core that can cope with the highs, lows and uncertainties that are endemic to the entrepreneurial process.

Are there other essential truths that you see as missing? How do you perform relative to the above keys to success?

Related Posts:

1. Core concepts learned doing seven startups.
2. My blog post, "On Intellectual Honesty."
3. What is Bikram Yoga (10 years of practice and counting)?