13 May 2005
Just Say No!
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: General .
Dana Blankenhorn writes about No being the Entrepreneur’s Secret!
The secret to being a successful entrepreneur is learning how to handle NO.
I learned this lesson from an entrepreneurial friend of mine today, and it’s so important I had to blog it.
Entrepreneurs bring ideas to businesses and people. They sell these ideas, as businesses. They take a lot of meetings. And most of the time, maybe over 99% of the time, the answer at the end of the day is No.
“You have to turn it into an opportunity,” my friend said. You do that by finding someone else — a money source, another business — who will either run with your idea, finance your idea, or buy it outright.
And you keep moving.
The difference between entrepreneurs and other businesspeople is that most businesspeople are in the yes business. In a going concern you mostly hear yes. People do come in the door, people are satisfied, you do create systems that wind up giving value for money. If you’re not doing this, you’re out of business quickly.
Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are constantly being told no. It’s only when they get the yes that they have the chance to build that business they were describing, and this is usually the end of a long, long process. Yet the businesses an entrepreneur launches are often much better than those run by businesspeople, because they’ve been tested, vetted, and designed to grow fast.