5 MENTORS EVERY ENTREPRENEUR SHOULD HAVE

Entrepreneur. It's a tough word -- both to spell and to call yourself. Being an entrepreneur brings with it a love of leaping head first into the unknown. Life-long entrepreneurs love new challenges, and live their lives in a constant growth phase. One of the common resources an entrepreneur turns to is a mentor. Asking for advice and bouncing ideas off of others is essential to the success of an entrepreneur's journey.

I've been fortunate to have a variety of mentors over the years, and I can't imagine standing where I am if it wasn't for them. Despite all the challenges of running a business, the biggest constant in my life is those mentors, and their advice.

I also think it's important that mentors come from many different perspectives, as mine have. These are the five types of mentors I've had over the years, and the ones I think any entrepreneur can benefit from:

1. A friend that knew you before you started your own thing.

Perhaps no voice matters more than the one that knew you before you had a startup. They knew you when all this was just a dream, or when you didn't even know what a startup was. They can speak to your roots and ground you when you get lost in the startup haze.

For instance, when I go back home to the East Coast, my friends ask me about everything except tech and business. They tell me how impressed they are but remind me that I need to slow down, to live the life I want, doing what I love. No entrepreneur should lose sight of that.

2. A person with your similar skill set at your point of learning.

Having regular coffee dates or Skype chats with people who are in your similar phase of growth can lead to valuable relationships. I have a group like this, and we push each other and question each other's decisions. We have been there when things fell through and when our big days happened.

There is a confidence that can come with camaraderie like that. We understand what each of us is going through.

3. A colleague you don't love working with.

One of the biggest challenges that face any entrepreneur is justifying what you want to do and why it's going to disrupt the status quo -- whether it be to investors, future co-founders, team members, the press or others. It helps if you're good at talking to just about anyone. Fine tune your ability to take feedback and get good at turning it into positive results. There is no quicker way to do this than to push forward with a relationship that isn't particularly enjoyable or easy at first.

4. A person with the exact opposite skill set than yours.

Seek out mentors who are most unlike yourself. For me it's been coffees with product managers, and tech leads. I've met with chief operating officers and have standing chats with our office manager. Do I know much about any of that? Not really. Do I know more now than I did before I met with them? Sure as heck I do.

Having these types of mentors and encounters has motivated me to take classes in coding and financials, and it's humbling to see just how much you don't know. Life-long learning is critical to success in business, and particularly to those who have bought into an industry founded on innovation.

5. A friend who always knew you'd be an entrepreneur.

Meet often with someone who knows you as "your entrepreneurial self" and not in any other way. He or she is likely the one to say "you got this" and "this is what you do" -- even when you're doubting it yourself. That person can't imagine you ever taking the safe option or quitting. He or she would never tell you it's OK if you haven't given something your best effort, and will cheer every one of your accomplishments.

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From Entrepreneur Week

Fresh Idea: Entrepreneur Puts Salad in a Vending Machine

A visit to the vending machine can yield chocolate, chips or soda … but what about salad?

Chicago, Illinois-based Farmer’s Fridge founder Luke Saunders says vending-machine salad isn't really such a crazy concept.

“We do Mason jar salads, so everything is perfectly layered. We keep ingredients like tomatoes on the bottom and lettuce at the top, and that keeps everything fresh in there,” says Saunders. In addition to an innovative product, Farmer’s Fridge vending machines don’t look like the typical office standby, thanks to woodsy paneling and “grass” features.

“The idea was to have a more distributed healthy food network,” says Saunders. “I was traveling a lot for work, and I realized it was hard to put up a full-scale healthy food restaurant when demand wasn’t there. But there were people who wanted this option.”

The average cost of a salad is $8. Each morning, Farmer’s Fridge restocks the machines; discounted salads are available after 6 p.m. The company's healthy-food kiosk is now up and running in three locations with open contracts for 20 more in the coming weeks.

“And from there, we’ll kind of catch our breath and see if the model is working as we scale. And then our goal is to become a national brand,” says Saunders.

From Entrepreneur

By Gabrielle Karol

My Crazy Exhausting-Yet-Exhilarating Entrepreneur Life

“Man, I'm tired. It feels like I'm running a marathon.” Those were the first few words in my conversation with the CEO of a growing software company a few days ago. What he said next made me smile.

“I just wish I knew how far along I was in the race. Am I at mile 4 or 24?“

Such is the life of an entrepreneur. You’re in. You're committed. You're running as hard as you can. But it feels like the finish line should be a lot closer.

There are a lot of lessons you can learn from being the leader of a startup. Some of them you can learn in books. Others can be gleaned from reading popular blogs or attending seminars. But there are always a few lessons that you have to learn the hard way, experiences you have to feel to fully appreciate. Here are my insights into that world:

1. You're always losing until you're not. All that work you're doing can feel so much insanity until you get it right. It's often said that doing the same thing the same way and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. But that's how you crack stone. That's how you move mountains, one hammer blow at a time, one shovel full of dirt at a time -- until it’s done.

It's going to look like it's not working. Other people are going to keep reminding you that what you're doing is crazy and unreasonable. And they will be right -- up until the point that all your hard work pays off and you become a winner. Until then, get used to “losing.”

Tune out the critics. Focus on what matters.

2. The right plan doesn't exist. Just because a successful entrepreneur told you that he or she made millions of dollars building a business a certain way doesn’t mean you should adopt that formula. Frankly, just because a particular strategy brought success in the past doesn’t mean it will work the second or third time around.

Times change. So do strategies, technology and opportunity. What used to be impossible is now as easy as speaking into your phone. What once was a winning formula might now be a horrible waste of time and money. Think about this as you're building your plan.

Success is less about getting it right the first time and more about positioning yourself for taking advantage of opportunities as they emerge.

3. Brawn beats brains most of the time. All those people telling you to work smarter need to shut up. That  is an allusion. What really matters is the truths you figure out automatically after you’ve worked hard enough. Your focus should not be on anything other than massive amounts of hard work. That's how every major breakthrough in technology, math, sports and business has occurred -- through massive amounts of mind-blowing effort.

Doing hard work isn't an excuse for wasting time or not paying attention to your effectiveness. But you'll find yourself being more efficient the longer you work and the more tired you feel. Just work hard. While everyone is thinking, procrastinating and planning, you'll be busy executing.

There is something magical about getting things done. It cures just about any problem you have.

4. People matter more than ideas. There's no technology that can replace the effectiveness of a handshake. No amount of edgy thinking or bold technology can be more powerful than looking someone in the eye when you’re talking to them. Relationships matter.

The more logical things appear to be, the less they probably are. That's the beautiful complexity of being human. We’re weird about hiding emotion. We often don't truly say what is on our mind. If you looking to believe everything you hear from people whom you're trying to do business with, you find yourself flailing around from strategy to strategy, underperforming and never quite figuring out the formula for being successful.

Remember, the same irrational behavior you find inexcusable in others is how you, yourself, are wired to react.

Being an entrepreneur is just about the hardest job in the world. You might as well sign up to be the sparring partner for Mike Tyson in his raging prime. You're going to get a black eye or a bloody nose more than once. It comes with the territory.

But there's nothing more rewarding the following your dream and bringing to life an idea that no one else thinks is possible. Along the way you'll learn a few lessons of your own.

From Entrepreneur

By Dan Waldschmidt

The Quickest Way to Deliver Your Message? Make It Visual.

Whether it's connecting with customers, closing the deal with prospective clients, or promoting efficiency within your own operation, the quest to effectively cultivate and communicate your message is ongoing. One strategy that has recently gained traction is data visualization. Given today's fast-paced, cut-to-the-chase world, this makes perfect sense. We want our information, we want it now and we don't want to have to put much thought into digesting it.

The effectiveness of data visualization goes beyond our shrinking attention spans -- it speaks to our biology, according to Noah Iliinsky, co-author of Designing Data Visualizations.

“Our visual system is extremely well built for visual analysis,” Iliinsky explains. “There’s a huge amount of data coming into your brain through your eyes. Once that data arrives at the brain, it’s rapidly processed by sophisticated software that’s extremely good at tasks such as edge detection, shape recognition and pattern matching.”

It is this pattern matching, Iliinsky notes, that makes presenting information visually so beneficial, as it helps us identify trends, gaps and outliers. In other words, it allows us to see the true meaning of the data.

For businesses, this begs the question: How do we best leverage the value of data visualization? Here are three recommendations:

Infographics: the storyteller. As defined by Mashable, a prominent tech website, infographics are“graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge”that“present complex information quickly and clearly.”Done well, it delivers your message by weaving together thorough research and compelling copy with an engaging design.

What makes infographics such an effective marketing tool is two-fold: First, by including SEO-friendly terms, they can drive new users to your website through increased search visibility. Second, because they can easily be shared on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, they have a tendency to go viral, which obviously extends your brand to a wider, untapped audience.

Dashboards: data central. Businesses generate large amounts of data on a day-to-day basis, from potential leads, to what products are selling best and the hours dedicated to each client. Making sense of that data can be a challenge. Spend a few minutes poring over endless spreadsheets or reading through an exhaustive report, and it can feel undeniably overwhelming.

This is where dashboards come in. A centralized command center that compiles all of your pertinent data, they make it easy to see what’s going on within your organization. Stephen Few, a leading user interface dashboard expert, explains it like this: “(a) dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives, consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.”

Businesses enter data into the back end of the dashboard, and the dashboard then processes and produces it in a way of your choosing -- graphs, charts, tables, etc. -- that best fits your needs.

The value that a well thought-out dashboard brings to your company is far-reaching. It gives you the means to easily analyze trends, which allows you to hone your marketing strategies, helping you to optimize sales and customer engagement. It takes the man hours that would previously have been devoted to sorting through acres of data and redirects them towards growing your brand. Simply put, dashboards rid your operation of any unnecessary waste, which, in turn, raises productivity, lowers costs and increases your bottom line.        

Mobile apps: a match made in heaven. While infographics tell a good story quickly, and dashboards organize and display your data, mobile apps marry the two together. Designed with a focused flow to connect with all audiences, apps are a versatile interface for your business, giving users as much or as little detail as they desire.

For those who want to get a high-level view of your company, scrolling straight through an app from start to finish will give them what they are looking for. Working almost as an interactive infographic, successful apps utilize compelling copy and appealing visuals to construct a road map of sorts, communicating in broad terms to the user what you are about, what it is that you do and what you can do for them.

On the other hand, for those who wish to explore your brand a little deeper, taking advantage of the built-in stops along the way allows them to drill down and access additional documents, charts, graphs and other nuts-and-bolts data. It is in these sections of the app where you can show -- instead of just telling -- the true value you can provide.

Best of all, as the name suggests, mobile apps are, indeed, mobile. And once they are downloaded to a person's tablet or smartphone, they can be accessed without an internet connection. This means that no matter where users go, your brand is always right there with them.

From Entrepreneur

By Khuram Zaman

5 Tools For Entrepreneurs to Grow Their Online Presence in No Time

Growing your online presence is no easy job - especially for small and midsize business that are often lacking the brand awareness and resources of their much larger counterparts. Fortunately, now, more than ever there are a plethora of tools to help newly-minted entrepreneurs build their brand quickly and cheaply.

Here are five to help jumpstart your online-community presence.

1. Buffer to post content. Content sharing is one of the easiest way to grow and nurture your community. Yet, with more and more social platforms popping up online, content sharing can be time consuming, as each has its own style and messaging. Enter Buffer. This tool is a great way to streamline your posting and schedule on multiple platforms, making sure you're talking to everyone where it counts. Plus, it's a great way to keep your communications going on the weekend, a time when many users are interested in sharing online content.

2. LaunchCrew to launch campaigns. When launch day comes, startups need to get the word out to as many people to have the most impact and increase the probability of being heard in crowded industries. Often this entails getting your current followers to share with their friends, family and connections. LaunchCrew will help you do just that. It lets you cast a much wider net, practically doubling or tripling your impact. But how? By asking your audience for their credentials to be able to post on their behalf on the day of your launch. Or for any major campaign. You'll get that initial boost you've always dreamed of - the one you really need these days to break out of the pack from the very start.

3. Unbounce to create landing pages. Landing pages are now a must-have design choice to boost your online special operations. By customizing these towards a targeted audience, along with specific and relatable calls to action, it makes them way more efficient at achieving higher click-through rates. Unbounce allows you to create landing pages incredibly fast, with no technical skills required, making it easy not only to build but also to A/B test and implement the best results.

4. Click to Tweet to foster sharing. It’s ok to ask people to share. But the simpler it is, the more people you’ll get to do so. By giving out a simple, pre-composed click-to-tweet URL for your audience to tweet in seconds, you’ll find that your potential for virality is drastically increased.

5. Mention to monitor and react. Once people start talking about you, the best way to continue growing is to detect these mentions and to reply to every one of them. By doing so, it fosters a lot of motivation for them to talk and mention even more about you, creating a network of trusted brand advocates. By having alerts based on keywords -- like the name of your company, your products or your competitors -- mention allows you to stay in the know and react in seconds by connecting your social accounts directly to the app.

With these five tools, you'll find yourself developing and maintaining a clear brand voice in no time. And it's then that you'll start to see your online presence heating up.

From Entrepreneur

By Clément Delangue

Nigeria Economy Set to Leapfrog South Africa on Data Revamp

Nigeria may leapfrog South Africa as the continent’s biggest economy when the government statistics agency publishes revamped data this weekend.

The National Bureau of Statistics is set to release gross domestic product figures based on 2010 production patterns in Africa’s most populous country, the first time Nigeria has overhauled the data in two decades. A report will be released at a press conference in the capital, Abuja, at about 2 p.m. local time on April 6.
The revision may boost the size of the economy by as much as 60 percent to between $384 billion and $424 billion, according to London-based Renaissance Capital Ltd., lifting Nigeria ahead of South Africa in the World Bank’s global rankings.
“This will make it increasingly hard for companies looking at Africa to overlook Nigeria, especially considering the size of the domestic market and its potential,” Samir Gadio, a strategist at Standard Bank (STAN) Group Ltd. in London, said in an e-mailed response to questions.
The World Bank calculated Nigeria’s GDP at $263 billion in 2012 and South Africa’s at $384 billion. The West African nation’s population of 170 million is more than three times bigger than South Africa’s.
Regardless of the new GDP number, investment in oil-producing Nigeria is constrained by power and infrastructure bottlenecks, corruption and weak governance. Nigeria’s power supply is less than a 10th of South Africa’s, while the West African nation was ranked at 144 out of 177 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index last year.
GDP Ratios
“Addressing these shortcomings will probably have much more impact on investment than the perception that Nigeria is now a bigger economy,” Gadio said.
The statistics agency said on March 28 it’s increased the number of industries in the GDP calculation to 46 from 33, adding telecommunications, financial institutions, insurance, real estate and film-making.
The new numbers will probably lower Nigeria’s debt-to-GDP ratio, while reducing the proportion of government revenue to GDP.
“Crucially, what is not always clear is how governments then respond to these new ratios,” David Cowan, an Africa economist at Citigroup Inc. in London, said in an e-mailed response to questions. “Do they think they can borrow a lot more, or do they think the best policy response is to boost tax revenue? The latter is clearly the better policy response.”
Nigerian Poverty
The naira has dropped 2.1 percent against the dollar this year and was trading at 163.77 on the interbank market as of 7:24 a.m. in Lagos, the commercial capital.
Per capita GDP in Nigeria is estimated at $2,666, according to data from the World Bank, compared with $11,255 in South Africa.
The NBS’s most recent poverty survey, published in 2012, shows that 61 percent of Nigerians were living on less than a dollar a day in 2010, up from 52 percent in 2004. In the desert northeast, where Amnesty International estimates at least 1,500 people have been killed this year as security forces battle a Islamist insurgency, poverty rates may be even higher.
Nigeria emerging as the biggest economy in Africa “changes nothing in terms of the challenges facing the economy -- the need to build infrastructure,” Cowan said. “Nigeria will remain a poor country in terms of per capita income, even compared to South Africa.”

From Bloomberg

By Daniel Magnowski

Take a step back to think about the risks

Business owners are so busy juggling the daily challenges of managing their business, suppliers, clients and staff that they often fail to take a step back and assess the various risks they face.

This is according to Gerrie van Biljon, executive director of Business Partners Limited, who says that while it is not very pleasant, in the midst of this juggling, to dwell on the negative incidents that can still go wrong, the simple act of thinking about these, and the mere awareness of it, can mean the difference between success and failure.

“In our daily dealings with small and medium enterprises, we have seen setbacks within businesses as a result of disasters that have struck throughout the years, namely external disaster such as floods, power outages and new legislation. But there are also internal business risks such as computers crashes, new competition, strikes and new innovation.”

While it is important for business owners to deliberately set aside time to assess the risks facing their business, they also need to be aware of key areas within their business that could potentially be affected as a result of these risks, says Van Biljon.

“Business owners need to accept that they cannot think of everything and instead need to concentrate on the basics. These include fire, theft, accident, loss of key personnel and loss of data. By listing the basics and spending time considering these risks in the context of the business, they have already done more than many other business owners, and have awakened a crucial awareness.”

However, Van Biljon advises against undertaking the exercise alone as this may lead to significant aspects being left off the list of possible risks which face the business. He recommends that business owners approach any large corporation that they deal with, either suppliers or clients, and ask how these parties consider risks. Where possible he advises that business owners use experts to assist.

“Risk management is a fairly recent discipline in the corporate world, but most large organisations have undergone at least a few formal risk assessment processes. Knowledge of the approach to risk is therefore relatively widely spread in those organisations and a sympathetic contact on the inside could be willing to help with some pointers.”

He adds that ideally, business owners should contemplate each of the set of risks one by one, prioritise them according to how likely they are to happen, and put precautions and contingency plans in place. “For example, most business robberies happen after the perpetrators have scouted the premises by gaining entry under some pretext, such as pretending to be looking for someone. By installing some form of access control, a business can dramatically lower its chances of being burgled.”

He adds that risk assessment is unfortunately not simply something that a business owner can do once to get it over with. “Risk assessment is an exercise that needs to be done regularly as a business’s risk changes constantly, not only because of changes inside the business, but also because of changes in the environment around the business.”

Some of these risks can be countered, or at least the entrepreneur would be aware of the possible risks, says Van Biljon. “A strategy or a back-up plan can be instituted and where possible insurance should be in place.

“Insurance experts could assist a business owner with a general risk assessment that will protect the business against inadequate or inappropriate cover. It is, however, imperative that the business owner selects a reputable and knowledgeable insurance broker to minimise the risk as it is certainly possible for a business to be over-insured, and insurance is only a small, if crucial, part of risk management.”

He says that even if few business owners get around to implementing regular, formal risk management processes, it is important to adopt awareness and an approach to business that takes risks into account. “It comes down to the survival of the cleverest. The cleverest business owners learn from setbacks of others. Average business owners learn from their own setbacks, and the foolish never learn; neither do they last long in business,” concludes Van Biljon

From How We Made it in Africa

By Business Partners team