One of the popular quotes of Steve Jobs goes like this, “I’m convinced about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance”. Statistics show that around 80-90% of start-ups fail and only around 10% of them succeed within the first year.
While many aspects that attribute to this failure, some of the main reasons behind the failure include competition, weak founding team, misreading market demand, etc. This is where you need to seek the advice of people who have tasted success and show you the correct path to success through true-to-life advice.
Ziad K Abdelnour is the founder and CEO of Blackhawk Partners Inc., and has more than 30 years of experience in Wall Street and helped more than 125 startups succeed. Ziad holds an MBA in Finance from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and is acclaimed to be one of the top-rung business minds in the world.
Ziad is the author of two best-selling books including, “Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics” and ”Startup Saboteurs: How Incompetence, Ego, and Small Thinking Prevent True Wealth Creation”. In this article, we’ll be taking a look at the key takeaways from his book Start-up Saboteurs.
Startup Saboteurs: How Incompetence, Ego, and Small Thinking Prevent True Wealth Creation
In his book, Ziad Abdelnour shows budding entrepreneurs and businessmen about how to create true wealth and attain financial freedom. The book provides its readers with insightful experiences about how to crack the secret code to impress the VCs and get funded quickly. Ziad also reveals a lot of things about how entrepreneurs need to put aside their ego, limited thinking and stop worrying about the outcome.
The book generally talks everything about wealth creation as Ziad says it is this philosophy that helped him taste huge success. Ziad K Abdelnour is renowned for being brutally honest in voicing his opinions and you can expect the same in this book too. At the end of reading this book, an entrepreneur will have a clear idea about how to approach the VC’s, how to pitch your business plan, how to negotiate and how to treat every mistake as an opportunity.
The Startup Basics
A good beginning is half the battle won, but entrepreneurs nowadays start imagining themselves as the next Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. They start with a false belief that if they have a viable business plan, then they get funded by VCs, launch their products and sell it for some huge money.
But in today’s world, things have changed and Ziad advocates that the lean-startup model as the best way to move forward for an entrepreneur. “The fail fast, fail cheap” mentality doesn’t cause a huge dent on the VC’s money as well as in their minds. And start-ups can create a prototype, get feedback from various ends and build a liable and working model to get the next round of investment to go big.
No Mistakes, Only Lessons
Ziad states that in life, there are no mistakes, but only lessons. It is time that entrepreneurs to start learning from failures and move on. Successful entrepreneurs are that the one that is proactive, practice perseverance and take failure happily.
Don’t Oversell
One of the key skills to become a successful entrepreneur is to have the knack of pitching it right to the VCs. While the concept may be out-of-the-box, most VCs don’t like you bragging about it for long. VCs only look at how the concept is sustainable, scalable and can rake in some money.
Be Clear with Your Goals
VCs always look upon an entrepreneur to see how shrewd, passionate and clear about his goals. If don’t have a proper answer with breakup about how you will be spending the money, VCs won’t even bother to hear the rest of your pitch.
