If you’re an entrepreneur, you should be celebrating today
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It’s National Entrepreneur Day today, but if I know my fellow founders and serial startup-ers, few of us will take the time to celebrate ourselves. We’re too busy trying to get our great ideas to market. Yes, we’re busy. Our work is important. But I think you should find five minutes to at least give yourself a silent toast. Because we all need a bit of encouragement from time-to-time.
The sheer numbers of how many of us are out there seem big – there are more than 580 million entrepreneurs in the world today with more than 31 million of them in the United States – but we barely break a double-digit fraction of the population. That’s right: barely 10 percent of the global adult population are entrepreneurs.
I’ve always been someone who wanted to control my own destiny, and I spend a lot of time with like-minded individuals so I was a little surprised how relatively few of us are out there. Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone. It’s hard. You have to have a lot of confidence that your idea or product or service is vital to the world. You have to be able to convince others that you’re right. You have to be able to put a team together to get you over the finish line. And you have to find financial support for it all – especially when you’re starting out.
I started Arrive.tech back in 2014. We’re on the cusp of breaking out and revolutionizing the last inches of the last mile in the advanced logistics industry. How did I keep the fire lit in the past decade of ups and downs and side trips? Glad you asked.
Six things I’ve learned as an entrepreneur
- Don’t hesitate: You might have a great idea, but you’re not alone: After being beat to the patent office a couple of times, I learned that if a great market solution is clear to me, others can see it, too. I beat Amazon, and the USPS to the patent office by days with my concept of a smart mailbox designed for autonomous delivery. Having that first position is key, especially in this technology-driven world.
- Iterate: My first design was rudimentary at best, and we’ve spent years adding things here, trimming things there and developing what’s turned into a Mailbox-as-a-Service platform. Could we have had a product in the field long before now? Yes. But by being open to new ideas, our product will serve a much greater need while still being open to improvements.
- Trust beats Skill: Don’t get me wrong. It’s important to have highly skilled and agile team members. But trust is more important than anything. I learned that lesson the hard way, and it made me slow to expand my team again. But no one person can do it all. Find the right people. Empower them and get out of their way.
- Be forgiving: Every business will stutter and have failures. Chalk failures up as learning experiences and move on. Dwelling on them will only slow you down. But do learn from them. Repeating the same mistake is just bad business.
- Birds of a feather soar together: Much like trust, finding people who jell with your workstyle, who aren’t afraid to speak up and who add value to meetings rather than just taking up space is key.
- Perfection is the enemy of progress. Iteration and improvement are two words you should embrace, especially for a product that relies on or is in the tech space. And these days, what product or service doesn’t rely on tech? Put your best effort forward, but change is constant. Don’t hold back from the market if you’re close. You can bet your competition will overtake you if you linger.
There you go. Reading this doesn’t qualify as properly celebrating Entrepreneur Day. Cheers to you and all of us with the determination to make a difference in the business world.
Dan O’Toole is CEO of Indianapolis-based Arrive, which is revolutionizing autonomous last-mile delivery and pickup with its smart and secure mailboxes and Mailbox-as-a-Service platform.
