Five Habits of a Successful Entrepreneur

Whenever people ask me the blanket question “What advice do you have for entrepreneurs?” I always hem and haw making up an answer on the spot. I spent a few minutes today thinking about the advice I’d tell myself if I knew what I know now when I started my company nine years ago. Here are the five habits of a successful first-time entrepreneur:

1. Read one of the Personal MBA books every other week until you’ve finished all of them, and then never stop reading a highly recommended book every other week
2. Have lunch with an entrepreneur you don’t know well every week and prepare a casual list of questions that you’d like to know his/her thoughts on
3. Join an EO-like organization immediately for peer-to-peer accountability groups and get actively involved on the board in a leadership role
4. Improve at least one thing in your business every week and don’t be afraid to try improvements that will fail
5. Actively re-evaluate your company corporate culture on a monthly basis and continually make it better knowing that your corporate culture is the most sacred thing you’ll spend time on as an entrepreneur

As you can see, success, in my opinion, comes from doing simple, but time intensive activities on a consistent basis. Notice that I didn’t say spend 100 hours per week on the business, develop a comprehensive business plan, or raise money from VCs. If you do the things outlined above, and apply your insights to your business, you will be successful.