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Entrepreneurship is never easy, leave alone when you’re young or even have to combine business and studies. Although the latter is a more viable option due to the on-hand experience you can receive together with a diploma, overload can negatively influence your startup or grades, or both.
Often, students can’t prioritize since they’re only learning how to do it. For example, some eagerly delegate assignments to WritePaper when they acknowledge they can’t handle everything on their own. And some would rather burn out than address for help. However, what about the real and specific examples of the mistakes that you should avoid? We’ve created a list of the most typical ones.
Spreading Oneself Thin
Having a major in Entrepreneurship and a double minor degree in Finance and Communication, Lauren Amarante is known for co-founding the World Entrepreneurship Day (WED). Although it’s hard to observe her activity these days, back in 2009-2010, when Lauren was still a sophomore, she faced tremendous success.
In order to unite entrepreneurs around the world and celebrate their efforts, the student and her mentor decided to found WED. The very first celebration united entrepreneurs from 22 countries. In 2010, WED partnered with the UN and reached the number of 35 countries. Now, what’s the mistake?
After the successful foundation of WED, Lauren started receiving a lot of invitations to various events connected with entrepreneurship. Even though her primary goals didn’t align with attending all of those, it wasn’t that easy to decline the invitations. After struggling for some time, she learned to say ‘no,’ streamlined her activity, and was able to focus on her main business goals.
Limited Business Planning
When high school students from the Academies of Loudoun teamed up to create biodegradable pots, they planned a lot of things to launch their business. The INCubatoredu program helped them start to Grow Greenly. They spent months testing various materials to create pots that would easily decompose after being planted into the ground without harming nature.
Yet, they didn’t consider the stability of materials – it wasn’t high enough for the pots to be safely transported. When it comes to physical products, business planning is even more essential than usual.
Distrust
The common worry of young entrepreneurs is that their employees may ruin the reputation they’ve cherished for so long. For instance, Emil Motycka, a founder of his own lawn mowing business, worked hard on building business connections.
He took a loan to buy his first lawnmower and started building the brand image. However, distrust made him try to control everything that concerned his business, which is basically impossible, at least if you make some progress.
He worked tirelessly and became exhausted due to the huge workload, just like college students do when they refuse to address a write my paper service for help. After some time, he worked on this issue and found the employees he could rely on, which made him less busy and more successful.
Wrong Marketing Strategy
Funtastech LLC started as a team project of students from Barrington, Illinois. Its purpose was to make older generations more educated about modern technologies. In particular, it was about teaching them how to handle their gadgets and be digitally literate.
Unfortunately, they faced a major setback at the stage of launching the minimum viable product. According to the marketing plan, they decided to advertise the tutoring service via social media. This strategy, however, wasn’t viable – the target audience just wasn’t using those. This mistake teaches that one should thoroughly research the target audience when starting a business and only then compile a strategy.
Poor Finance Management
Andrew Fashion earned more than $2,000,000 on his school startup. And he is known for the extreme mismanagement of this money. No, he didn’t spend it on services from a professional paper writer from WritePaper.com or on a new unsuccessful startup. Those were gambling, cars, and other fancy stuff that made it be gone with the wind.
Financial literacy is a skill that develops after a certain age. This is true mostly because people learn more about it at college or after it when they start business and take baby steps when trying to become independent individuals. Andrew dropped out to pursue his business goals, and maybe that was his primary mistake.
Giving Up Before Actually Trying
When studying at high school, Nick Tart came up with the idea of creating candles with specific scents. He bought all the necessary materials, mixed Tabasco with wax to create strong aromas, and finally, was satisfied with the results.
However, his friends and family didn’t appreciate the idea and were not quite supportive of it. So, Nick gave up on his creation only to discover several years later that another guy made an entrepreneurial breakthrough with a similar idea. Better to try and fail than never to try.
Stopping After a Failure
This last point is not about successful entrepreneurs people may have heard about. It’s about all those young students who failed once and, thus, decided that business is not their cup of tea. As you can see from the previous examples, almost all of them have become successful in the end simply because those business owners worked hard and learned from their mistakes.
If you ever think that a failure is a sign that you should quit, remember this: before reaching success, Adam Horowitz, who started his business when he was 18 years old, had to face numerous failures. Just imagine, he spent 3 years creating 30 websites, and only then did the success hit him!
So, try to make reasonable conclusions and plans for the future every time you make a mistake:
- instead of saying ‘I should have,’ say ‘next time I will;’
- instead of thinking ‘I failed,’ think ‘that’s a mistake I can learn from;’
- instead of deciding that you’re no good at this, try to remember what goal you had in the first place – it’s very important to have one!
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