Five Most Important Lessons I’ve Learned As An Entrepreneur – Guy Kawasaki
Popular entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and blogger, Guy Kawasaki understands business. Guy is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine, and author of eight books on innovative business. He’s a guy who should know what he’s talking about. Here he expounds on the following principles:
- Focus on cash flow.
- Make a little progress every day
- Try stuff.
- Ignore schmexperts
- Never ask anyone to do something that you wouldn’t do. ( And he’s funny too… listen to this advice:) This goes for customers (“fill out these twenty-five fields of personal information to get an account for our website”) to employees (“fly coach to Mumbai, meet all day the day you arrive, and fly back that night”). If you follow this principle, you’ll almost always have a good customer service reputation and happy employees.
But the most important of these, AdvancingWomen believes, particularly for start ups, is
“Focus on cash flow. …cash is what keeps the doors open and pays the bills. Paper profits on an accrual accounting basis is of no more than secondary or tertiary importance for a startup. As my mother used to say, “Sales fixes everything.”
