OK, we were supposed to wrap up the WOW’s back in February, but the two of us have been pretty caught up in this whole ‘find the next opportunity’ thing. It’s amazing how even the littlest of goals are hard to accomplish when you’re 110% focused on one thing. We’re both still looking for our ‘permanent’ jobs and should have some pretty cool announcements over the coming months. In the meantime, wish us luck.

Words of Wisdom (in no particular order)

Learn to Laugh at Yourself: A lot of us tend to take business pretty seriously. Too many of us take business way too seriously. We’ve said this before, but when you’re starting a company, nothing is going to go as planned. You’re going to make mistakes, issues are going to arise, money will be scarce and who knows, maybe the boat carrying all of your product to the States sinks. All of these issues can cause the stress level to rise for even the most laid-back entrepreneurs. Somehow, someway, you’ve got to find a way to release all of that tension and stress. Our method? We learned to just laugh at ourselves. We chalked everything up as a learning experience, vowed to try to not make the same mistakes twice and then vented our frustrations through a humorous MS Word diary entitled The MouseDriver Chronicles. Talk about uncut. If you thought the book was funny, you should convince us to release the diary.

Drop the Ego: There’s a time and place in business when displaying your ego is appropriate. We’re going to go out on a limb here and say that when you’re starting a company, you probably want to keep that ego in check. Regardless of who you are, you’re past experiences, where you went to school, etc., chances are there are people that you’re going to deal with that know more than you do, especially in the beginning. As an entrepreneur, the tendency is to react negatively to people who criticize you, your product/service, your company, etc. Once you figure out how to drop the ego, take a good listen to what these people have to say…you’ll learn more that you could ever possibly imagine. (PS: This is hard to do!)

The Luck of the Irish: Before you start modeling yourself after the multi-gazillionaires who started companies out of their apartments and turned them into world leading businesses in 10 years, understand that a big part of these people’s success came from pure LUCK. Luck is huge in business. Sometimes, people just happen to be in the right place at the right time and have the smarts (street or otherwise) to take advantage of that luck. A bunch of these dotcom millionaires who say that they made it because of a great team, great funding, great business model, etc. never want to say that luck was involved. Whatever. We know that you can’t plan for luck, but just realize that people who have made it big-time may not be any smarter, may not have a better network and may not have done anything differently. They just got lucky. Hopefully, luck is on your side as well.

Stay the Course: One thing that we tell first-time entrepreneurs is that as you learn more and more about your business, your strategy is going to change. It happened to us a number of times and we found ourselves changing directions on a consistent basis…at least in the beginning. The thing to keep in mind here? Once you think you’ve locked down your strategy and are well on your way to implementing your strategy, try to stay the course. At some point in time, you’ve got to just point in one direction and go. If you keep changing directions and shifting with the wind, you’ll never get anywhere.

Live the Experience: Another thing that we tell first-time entrepreneurs is that the experience of actually starting and growing a company is going to be a phenomenal one, from both a personal and business perspective. You learn so much about yourself, how you react in times of stress, how you deal with other people, what you really do and don’t like to do, how much risk you can stomach, how good you are at balancing your time, etc. It truly is one huge life-learning experience. As you’re going through the entrepreneurial process, keep in mind that you should be ‘living the experience.’ That is, take the time to soak it all in and to realize that you may never have this type of opportunity again. Think of entrepreneurship as an investment in yourself. No matter what happens, no matter if you succeed or fail, you’ll have a positive return on investment (ROI) because you will have learned something about yourself that can be applied in all facets of life. Sounds deep, huh?

Give Something Back-Socially Responsible: We started sending out the Insiders in September 1999 not because we thought that it would one day lead to a book, but because we wanted to educate others on our progress of bootstrapping a company out of our kitchen. We felt like we were learning something that 1) others wanted to know more about and 2) we thought others should know about. In a way, we felt like it was our responsibility to educate, motivate and inspire others to take the entrepreneurial plunge. Four years later, both of us are even bigger believers that entrepreneurs should give something back. Whether it’s to the community, the environment, other entrepreneurs, a school, an organization, etc. we believe that it’s our inherent responsibility to share our insights, knowledge, mistakes and lessons learned with others so that they too can have the type of experiences that we’ve had. Plus, there’s always something to be said about good Karma!

That’s it for our WOW’s. We could probably identify another 100 WOW’s but the ones that we’ve passed along in the last three newsletters are at the top of our list. The next (and last) MouseDriver Insider edition will cover the 5 things we would have done differently…knowing what we know now.

Hope everyone is doing well.

© 2003 Platinum Concepts, Inc.