6 Ways To Improve Your Chances Of New Venture Success

Every entrepreneur wants to know how they can improve their odds on the road to success, and why some entrepreneurs seem to be able to squeeze success out of even a marginal business case. Most experts agree that is has lot to do with your level of passion, determination, and innovation, modulated by a strong focus on reality, common sense, and street smarts.

John Bradberry, in his classic book “6 Secrets To Startup Success” explores many of these attributes, especially passion, and defines some useful principles to help enthusiastic entrepreneurs squeeze the most out of their passion, while not being trapped by it. Every existing and budding entrepreneur should internalize these reality principles:

1. Ready yourself as a founder. Too often, passionate entrepreneurs leap head first into a venture before thinking it through. To improve your readiness to succeed as a startup founder, take an honest look at yourself as a founder before leaping. Reality-check your goals, then focus on ways to leverage your skills, assets, resources, and relationships.

2. Attach to the market, not your idea. Passion is an inner phenomenon, but all healthy businesses are rooted outside the founder, in the marketplace. To turn your passion into profits, emphasize the market, and always think about your business relative to the customers you serve. Know your markets and execute on your market opportunity by placing a priority on your customer’s experience and perception of value.

3. Ensure that your passion adds up. Passionate entrepreneurs tend to develop rose-colored plans, over-estimating early sales and underestimating costs. To convert your passion into tangible business value, write a business plan that makes financial sense for the needs and future goals of your startup, and have it checked by an expert.

4. Execute with focused flexibility. No amount of startup planning can accurately predict the unexpected twists and turns imposed by reality. To succeed, a new venture needs both iteration and agility. Establish an ongoing process for translating ideas into actions and results, followed by evaluation.

5. Cultivate integrity of communication. Passionate commitment to an idea can breed reality distortion. That is, aspiring entrepreneurs often see only what they want to see and rely on “feeling good” about their venture as their only measure of success. Commit to building the skills essential for high-integrity communication: curiosity, humility, candor, and scrutiny.

6. Build stamina and staying power. Contributing factors aside, most startups fail because they run out of money or time. To lengthen and strengthen your venture’s runway, aim to launch close to the customer and raise more money than you’ll think you need. Focus on building personal staying power, maximize learning, and improvements.

These principles will help keep you from falling into the passion trap. Bradberry defines this trap as a self-reinforcing spiral of beliefs, choices, and actions that lead to critical miscalculations and missteps which result in rigidly adhering to a failing strategy until it’s too late to recover. Entrepreneurs who fall into this trap usually don’t even see it coming.

According to Small Business Association figures, about six million Americans a year make the bold leap onto the startup path, with many more worldwide, and many have no corporate safety net to fall back on. Unfortunately, less than half of these new ventures survive beyond a few years. Too many of these have fallen into the passion trap.

Of course, passion is what real entrepreneurs live for, and they sometimes assume it can take them anywhere they want to go. But those who continually temper their passion with reality principles, and adjust their course, are much more likely to see success in getting there. Like the line from a country song, “if you don’t where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else.”

Marty Zwilling

Martin Zwilling is the Founder and CEO of Startup Professionals, a company that provides services to startup founders around the world. See more details at www.startupprofessionals.com