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Every new business owner wants to know how they can improve their odds on the road to success, and why some professionals seem to be able to squeeze success out of even a marginal new opportunity. Most experts agree that it has lot to do with your level of passion, determination, and innovation, modulated by a strong focus on reality, common sense, and street smarts.
John Bradberry, in his classic book “6 Secrets To Startup Success” explores many of these attributes, especially passion, and defines some useful principles to help enthusiastic owners squeeze the most out of their passion, while not being trapped by it. Every existing and budding business owner should internalize these reality principles:
- Ready yourself as a founder. Too often, passionate aspiring owners leap head-first into a venture before thinking it through. To improve your readiness to succeed as a new business founder, take an honest look at yourself as a founder before leaping. Reality-check your goals, then focus on ways to leverage your skills, assets, resources, and relationships.
- Attach to the market, not your idea. Passion is an inner phenomenon, but all healthy businesses are rooted outside the founder, in the marketplace. To turn your passion into profits, emphasize the market, and always think about your business relative to the customers you serve. Know your markets and execute on your market opportunity by placing a priority on your customer’s experience and perception of value.
- Ensure that your passion adds up. Passionate new business founders tend to develop rose-colored plans, over-estimating early sales and under-estimating costs. To convert your passion into tangible business value, write a business plan that makes financial sense for the needs and future goals of your startup, and have it checked by an expert.
- Execute with focused flexibility. No amount of startup planning can accurately predict the unexpected twists and turns imposed by reality. To succeed, a new venture needs both iteration ability and agility. Establish an ongoing process for translating ideas into actions and results, followed by evaluation.
- Cultivate integrity of communication. Passionate commitment to an idea can breed reality distortion. That is, aspiring business professionals often see only what they want to see and rely on “feeling good” about their venture as their only measure of success. Commit to building the skills essential for high-integrity communication: curiosity, humility, candor, and scrutiny.
- Build stamina and staying power. Contributing factors aside, most new ventures fail because they run out of money or time. To lengthen and strengthen your business’s runway, aim to launch close to the customer and raise more money than you’ll think you need. Focus on building personal staying power, maximize learning, and improvements.
Stamina is generally considered to be the energy and mental strength to continue with a difficult process. It helps if you make your new business a series of sprints, rather than a marathon. Instead of long hours each day, choose the times you are most productive and sprint.
These principles will help keep you from falling into the passion trap. Bradberry defines this trap as a self-reinforcing spiral of beliefs, choices, and actions that lead to critical miscalculations and missteps which result in rigidly adhering to a failing strategy until it’s too late to recover. New business owners who fall into this trap usually don’t even see it coming.
According to Small Business Association figures, more than six million Americans a year make the bold leap onto the new venture path, with many more worldwide, and many have no corporate safety net to fall back on. Unfortunately, less than half of these new ventures survive beyond a few years. Too many of these have fallen into the passion trap.
Of course, passion is what real aspiring owners live for, and they sometimes assume it can take them anywhere they want to go. But those who continually temper their passion with reality principles, and adjust their course, are much more likely to see success in getting there. Like the line from a country song, “if you don’t where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else.”
Related: 6 Keys to Overcoming Business Setbacks and Gaining New Momentum