7 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Invest in Themselves

Startup entrepreneurs often go it alone or almost alone, serving every function in their new companies. They are the idea people, the passionate leaders, the team builders, engineers, marketing experts, logistics officers, bookkeepers and strategists all in one.  

The reality is that often this phase is necessary. That means that one of the most challenging things for the startup-minded to do is to keep investing, keep building their own personal skills and abilities. Time and focus-wise, it’s a monumental challenge. Most entrepreneurs skip the personal investments because those investments seem disconnected from their businesses and products. If an entrepreneur has an extra hour, for example, many prefer to invest in their company over investing in themselves.

The problem with that approach is that most entrepreneurs are their brands and products.

Moreover, if you can take a step back and see that your entire entrepreneurial venture rests on a single set of shoulders, it makes business sense to ensure that those shoulders are as prepared, as skilled and as strong as possible. That means investing in yourself because, from that perspective, it’s the same as investing in your product.

Because entrepreneurs spend so little time thinking about boosting their personal skills and strengths, remaining focused on their work, they often don’t know where to start. Since I’ve spent most of my professional life at the intersection of business and education, I have a few suggestions on how you can keep making investments in yourself, even if you’re an overwhelmed entrepreneur. Here are seven:

Go to school

Few things do more to enhance both your credibility and intellectual capacity than higher education. The learning environment itself can provide new connections and spark creativity. There are incubators offering specialized training now in every city. Finishing your degree or starting a new one can make a big difference and just about every school has a part-time or returning student or executive program.

Teach

A school environment is just as powerful if you’re teaching. And, like an advanced degree, being a teacher confers a great deal of credibility. Teaching also forces you to know what you’re teaching at expert level, confront and consider new ideas and explain things in new ways. If you’re an expert in something, reach out to community learning programs or colleges in your area and get in the classroom.

Online program

While the online learning environment is still buyer beware, more and more very credible institutions and incubators are offering online courses and programs. It’s possible to earn certifications in a variety of business-related subjects from places such as Harvard or Stanford or any number of state universities.  Even if you’re just exercising your mind or staying up-to-date on current topics and trends, it’s a good investment.

Read unrelated things

If you’re a reader, make sure your reading list includes topics that are unrelated to your business endeavors. Read crime thrillers or romance novels or theoretical physics – whatever will distract you from your hour-to-hour obsessions. Giving your mind a break will inspire creative problem solving and invigorate your work when you return to it. Just a few hours a week of reading about ants or Adam Ant can make a big difference.

“I read spy and espionage thrillers exactly because they district me from trying to run and grow my business,” said Edgar M. Duarte ofDuarte Monteiro Group in Miami. “If I read all business books or things in my field, I’d absolutely get sick of it. Taking a mental break allows me to really focus on business when I need to.”

Physical health

Among the biggest oversights entrepreneurs make is neglecting their physical health. If your ability to work is the most essential thing to your business success, it makes no sense to risk it. I know how hard it is, but get to the gym, make good health and diet choices. Take vacations. As with all these suggestions, staying healthy is an investment in your business – it may help to think of it that way.

Co-working

Consider moving yourself and your business to a co-working community. The collaborative, entrepreneurial spirit of shared ambition and sacrifice can be intoxicating and empowering. By co-locating, you’ll find mentors, partners and different-thinkers – all of whom can add to your personal growth and strategic creativity.

Network

Join organizations and attend events. Most people view networking as opportunities to advance their businesses. But they are just as important in building personal connections – assets you can take with you from project to project or business to business. Investing in networking and getting to know your network personally will increase your personal reach and capacity.

Amy Rosen

9 Intangible Assets Dominant Entrepreneurs Possess

Lose your degree. Years of experience can never fully convey your overall worth. There have to be more effective ways to display your value to a potential employer and to the business world at large.

Plain and simple, the resume is old and broken. It hasn’t had a major overhaul in nearly 380 years and it’s time to disrupt how job-seekers and hiring managers find the best candidates to fill positions. Our higher education system is a mess, and online schools continue to challenge the education model. Yet, we still use these same archaic methods for sourcing the right people by only scrutinizing education and years of experience through resumes. Blah!

Conversely, if you're an outlier with ridiculously high talent, unconventional education and little experience (or any combination thereof. For example, a 21-year-old self-taught hacker with no formal education and one year of "job experience."), this broken process makes it even more difficult for you to be discovered.

I’ve been obsessed with studying successful entrepreneurs and found that many have intangible qualities that wouldn’t, or couldn’t, be expressed on a standard resume. In addition, some entrepreneurs even had seemingly negative marks against them (by worldly standards at least) such as dropping out of college, not being able to hold a job, getting fired and unflattering social-media activity.

Here's a list of nine intangible assets that entrepreneurs possess:

1. Ingenuity

You ever hear the saying, being an entrepreneur is like building the bridge as you walk across it? This refers to those entrepreneurs who always answer “yes” when asked if they can do something (even if they have no clue and figure it out as they go). They are the first to volunteer for the seemingly undoable tasks. They do it with confidence, because they believe that they can accomplish anything they put their minds to, even if they have no idea what they are doing.

2. Stubbornness

I’m referring to good stubbornness. These are the “I won’t take no for an answer” people. These people love a challenge and will get back up even if they fall 100 times because they know they are one step closer to getting the result they want. Giving up is not an option.

Here’s a good example:

Kellee Khalil created Lover.ly, a visual search engine and cloud scrapbook for everything wedding-related. According to Business Insider, "One week before Kellee Khalil launched her wedding startup, she received a coffee invitation from a business strategist at a top bridal site. 'We have $70 million to buy competitors just so we can shut them down,' Khalil was told."

Unfazed by the message, and maybe even in spite of it, she has gone on to to build a wedding-site juggernaut where users now view more than 40 million images each month and have “loved and bundled” more than 400 million wedding details.

3. Cool under pressure

This is a tough skill to effectively measure on a person’s resume or LinkedIn profile.

Too many people are brilliant but can’t hang in the real world. They collapse under the first sign of adversity. Others can handle a decent amount of pressure before they crumble, but true A players thrive under pressure. It brings out the best in them. These are the entrepreneurs who seem to pull off the impossible.

4. Their network and peers

It sounds strange, but a person’s peers show a lot about who they are. People typically like to hang around others with the same interests and motivation levels. The saying goes that “you are the sum of five of your closest friends.”

It is the reason Entrepreneur’s Organization is so effective, and partly why LinkedIn exists.

5. Perseverance

Frederick Hutson did four years in the state penitentiary. That alone would dissuade most individuals from even thinking about starting a company, let alone attempt to disrupt an industry as big as the state prison system itself. He has since created a company, called Pigeon.ly, that provides inmates and their families with discounted phone calls and photo sharing.

The company boasts of supporting 2 million minutes per month on phone calls and a quarter-million photo shares. Pigeon.ly was recently accepted into Silicon Valley’s most prestigious accelerator, Y Combinator, and appears to have a very bright future.

Related: The 10 Qualities of Exceptional People

6. Vision

Vision is an undeniably key trait for successful entrepreneurs. Sometimes vision can be the result of having such extensive knowledge of an industry, technology or market that the entrepreneur almost seemingly knows what the world wants. Noah Kagan's vision with SumoMe, and its explosive growth is a perfect example. 

The other type of entrepreneurs' vision, that marks greats such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, is to bend the world to their vision.

7. Blind optimism

Justin Barr sold his company, Tapit, for $23 million. He was so blindly optimistic that he slept in his office and pulled all-nighters while working his butt off. He explains, “I just felt something, and went for it.” It didn’t matter what anyone else was doing in the space, he built a product he “knew” was going to be successful. He contributes his “blind optimism” towards his company’s success and ultimate acquisition. 

8. Opportunistic

I recently read about the publicity stunt Tucker Max and Ryan Holidaywere able to orchestrate during one of Tucker’s book launches. Long story short, Tucker was denied the opportunity to make a sizable donation to Planned Parenthood, but despite this, he was able to leverage the controversy into millions of new page views, website traffic and tens of thousands of social-media shares.

The pair saw an opportunity, and leveraged it to the hilt.

9. Execution

Career Sushi has more than 10,000 internships available with companies nationwide including Warner Music Group, Billboard, FunnyorDie.com, Gary Sanchez Productions, Lionsgate Entertainment, Michael Stars and Draftfcb. It is the brainchild of Shara Senderoff, a film industry executive and producer who was determined to fix what she saw as a broken process for hiring interns.

Here’s what she had to say in an interview, “My mindset from a very early age has always been 'to figure everything out and no matter what, find a solution.' I was born a problem-solver. I believe my 'find a solution' attitude has allowed me to set an example to those around me. I've learned to execute, execute and execute again and I don't think I'd have become the leader I am today if I didn't approach everything I do with the belief that I can always be better.”

My co-founder and I believe the traditional model of judging a person's professional worth is broken. That is exactly why we created Intangibly, and feel that this is arguably the most important factor. 

I leave you with this great Jobs quote:

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Andrew Medal

5 Necessary Conditions for Entrepreneurial Success

Every week I hear from people desperately trying to become successful entrepreneurs. They inevitably have loads of basic questions that instantly tell me they’ve taken the plunge prematurely and, as a result, have severely limited their chances of making it on their own.

I’m sure that’s not what you want to hear, but if I don’t tell you the truth, then who will? The problem is that’s the wrong way to do it. The hands-down best way to become a successful entrepreneur is to not try to become an entrepreneur in the first place.

Wait, what? That doesn’t make any sense. It sounds like a contradiction.

Au contraire, it does make complete sense. Not only that, it’s the best advice on entrepreneurship you’ll ever get. The thing is, nobody becomes a successful entrepreneur over the long haul by setting out to become one. It happens organically under certain conditions.

Related: 10 Behaviors of High Achievers

The problem is one of competitive markets. Entrepreneurship is about business, and a business that beats the competition and takes off is not so easy to contrive. For a venture to have even a snowball’s chance in hell of making it, several factors have to come together:

Opportunity.

Like it or not, opportunities don’t just pop out of your Mac’s screen and shout, “Here I am!” You have to go out and find them and explore them. Think of opportunities as branches off a tree trunk. You need to get out in the real working world to gain exposure to enough branches. That’s where everything else stems from.

Discovery.

Perhaps the hardest thing about a business is figuring out the right customer problem that needs to be solved. Without that, you’ve got nothing. Usually, that requires significant exposure, expertise, and experience. Otherwise, you’ll never come up with a winning product that beats the competition.

Expertise.

Every successful entrepreneur has some sort of expertise by the time they come up with the product or company that ends up making it. Maybe it was their passion from day one or perhaps they developed it while working for others. Whichever it is, there’s something they can do better than the pack … and BSing isn’t it.

Related: Quit Screwing Around and Get to Work

Network.

Whether its equity partners with the right mix of talent, investors, adult supervision, or some combination thereof, successful businesses almost always have several key players involved from the start or relatively early on. That requires a network – not an online one, a real network of real people you meet in the real world.

Savvy.

Not to be cliché, but businesses have lots of moving parts and it’s not easy to get everything working together unless you have some sort of business savvy. There are only three places to learn that: from your family, from business mentors, or by working hands-on in the business world.

Notice that the factors overlap. They’re actually all intertwined. That’s why not setting out to become an entrepreneur but getting out in the world and getting your hands dirty working is the easiest way to someday make it on your own. The real business world is where all those conditions come together. And that’s where most successful entrepreneurs find them.

The only caveat is that I assume you’re looking for some sort of breakout success where that becomes your livelihood and you make a very good living at it. Of course, you can slug it out with a gazillion competitors in a number of small businesses or make a go of it as a solopreneur, but that’s not exactly knocking the ball out of the park, if you know what I mean. 

Look, I know this might be disappointing for some of you, but trust me when I tell you, if you really want to make it big someday, you'll be better served by getting out and getting some experience than banging your head against a wall trying to figure out why things aren't working out for you. 

Related: The Secret to Winning Customers and Growing Your Business

Steve Tobak