With movies, such as Jobs and The Social Network presenting millennial entrepreneurs as brilliant and youthful gladiators, it is important to stay focused on the underlying trends with successful young entrepreneurs. After inspecting the current landscape, there are a number of traits, besides sheer genius or age, that are accurate predictors of success.
Despite having a less typical entrepreneurship story, David Kurzmann, the co-founder and CEO of Women’s Best, has built a brand reach of 150 million people and 8-figures in annual revenue. His business helps women lead healthy and positive lifestyles. As a non-traditional entrepreneur, his work and personality is the perfect counterpoint of Silicon Valley to sum up successful millennials.
1. Risk aversion
While entrepreneurs love to claim that they are fearless, taking unnecessary risks is foolish. Risk is not a good thing. While it may be enticing to wager everything you have on your startup’s vision, the odds say you will lose everything. This means the most successful entrepreneurs look for opportunities where the odds are skewed in their favor and where, no matter what the worst-case scenario is, they will still be able to rebound.
Everyone unconsciously underestimates disasters with low odds of happening. Furthermore, it can be easy to allow tunnel vision to block out awareness of risk probability. Overall, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to work on ensuring you are aware of all of your risks and avoid them where you can.
2. Passion
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Entrepreneurship requires both extreme commitment and skill, which means passion is usually a requirement for success. If you are not in love with what you are doing, it will be hard to push yourself through long hours or dark times. Even more so though, entrepreneurs need to be able to look at the world with a unique perspective and that uniqueness mostly frequently comes from passion.
Kurzmann has always had a passion for fitness and helping people. Each day, he is able to make a tremendous impact in millions of women’s health. Without his background in fitness, supplements, and health lifestyles, he would have never been able to develop his product line or consumer following.
3. Results-oriented
At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the money. Most organizations say they are results-oriented, but most organizations are also not results-oriented. Truly being results-oriented requires that you have consequences for negative performance. While you are running a startup, you are not able to afford losses on campaigns. As such, you need to make a positive ROI your first priority at all times.
Even more so, as you decide what products to sell and what content to produce, running tests over Instagram can be an incredible way of conducting market research. Kurzmann has an extensive testing process across all of his content platforms that allows him to always make decisions based on data and evaluate the decisions on a results basis.
4. Time management
It is not new knowledge that successful people need to balance their time and work on time management skills. But with the influx of digital media and technical solutions, time management has never looked so different. First off, simply using social media, watching Netflix, and consuming other digital stimulation makes it harder for you to focus. As such, time management also necessitates eliminating different modern activities that make it hard to focus. Reducing usage of social media, Netflix, and screens as a whole will help make you more efficient.
Furthermore, different solutions such as Google Calendars, AI assistants, virtual assistants, and SAAS platforms allow tech savvy millennials to streamline most of their work and never let anything slip through the cracks. Staying on top of your game will further allow you to focus, since you will no longer need to worry about reacting to what is next.
5. Creative problem solving
Every great startup revolves around a unique solution to a serious problem. Entrepreneurs are inherently creative problem solvers. But the biggest requisite is that the solution matches consumer needs. Without consumer centricity, startup ideas are merely theories with minimal chance of success.
If a product or service does not meet every consumer requirement, then it simply will never sell. The best millennial entrepreneurs are able to bring their fresh perspectives to the table, but still utilize a level of business maturity to evaluate market positioning and value creation. Kurzmann praised Elon Musk for his ability to think outside-the-box while creating value for society.
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