You only have to watch popular tv shows such as Shark Tank and others to see that ‘the pitch’ has become an all important asset in the entrepreneur’s toolbox. It’s a powerful way of connecting directly with potential customers, investors and partners and explaining why they should buy your product or service. So, what’s the secret to creating a powerful pitch that will win people over? Well, it all starts with knowing your audience and appealing to their interests and needs. In any pitch situation, start by doing your homework on your audience, understand what they are looking for, and what makes them ‘tick’ - and also, if possible, their previous buying patterns. This will give you a starting point. Next, ensure your messaging is simple but clear - your audience needs to know what you are trying to achieve, what your goals are, and what actions you need them to take. In any successful pitch, there needs to be a clear ‘what next’ on the part of the audience, leading them to make a decision. So the question is, how powerful is your pitch?

As any successful entrepreneur will tell you, it’s not enough to simply keep growing in business (although that’s always a good thing!). It’s also important to keep tracking your growth trajectory, to keep monitoring what’s working and why, and to continually learn and fine-tune things as you go. Tracking your success also keeps you motivated during those times when things might not be going quite so well. By having a clear set of metrics on how the business is performing week on week, it helps you to set targets to maintain growth, and importantly, to put in place remedial measures or new marketing initiatives if they are needed. From a personal perspective as a founding entrepreneur, tracking your success is also good for maintaining motivation and momentum. We all know how tough it can be to build a business, and there will be times when things don’t go as well as we hope. Perhaps that much anticipated big deal doesn’t come through, or a new product that carried high hopes for success doesn’t connect with customers in the way you anticipated. This is where tracking your success to date can give you a boost and keep you going.

Did you know that people form a first impression of a brand or a product they see in a mere 50 milliseconds. That’s why these days, if you want to reach your customers quickly and effectively, and importantly, make a powerful connection with them, ensuring you have great visual content is key. It’s impossible to ignore the growing power and value of visual content - you only have to look at the meteoric rise of social networks such as Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr. Customers, especially younger people, are increasingly consuming content and making buying decisions, online through the most visual channels. As entrepreneurs, particularly those creating products for the retail environment, it’s therefore critical to create digital marketing strategies that will tap into this growing appetite for highly visual content. So whether you choose to use videos, photographs, infographics, or memes to get your products and services to connect with customers, the bottom line is that visual content works. It helps people to connect, to understand, and make buying decisions based on what they see, faster.

Things are changing rapidly in the world of retail, and startup entrepreneurs are capitalizing on this retail revolution that is underway. Have you noticed how traditional bricks and mortar retail environments are continuing to take strain in many key cities, and now it’s all about connecting with customers in ways that work for them - and for many, that is in the digital e-commerce environment. And, this is particularly the case with luxury, niche products. In her book, The Shopping Revolution, Wharton Marketing Professor Barbara Kahn said, “It used to be enough to just have the very best luxury product. But in today’s very, very competitive retailing environment, it’s not OK to just be good at one thing.” The new skill that today’s successful niche, luxury product creators need to master is unique online shopping experiences that are tailored to appeal to their clientele, whilst at the same time ensuring they have global reach from a sales perspective. This is quite a shift from the established ‘white gloves’ notion of luxury retail. But with increasingly affluent younger customers dictating how they want to buy their products online in their discretionary time, smart entrepreneurs are taking notice.

How often do you hear about entrepreneurs who go through an agonizing process to choose a name for a business when starting out, only to have to change it further down the line because it doesn’t work in the marketplace or resonate with customers? Choosing the right name for any business is undoubtedly a tricky process, especially with the added complexity of ensuring the name fits into your web strategy. The best plan of action is to take a checklist approach to the process before sitting down with your brand team. Firstly, look at your business personality and its product or service offering, and then brainstorm names that are easy to remember, easy to say, but that also hint in some way, what you do. It’s okay to be creative but great company names deliver a short, unique and to-the-point message about your brand. Remember, they also need to work effectively with SEO and social media, so think out of the box but also think how the name needs to work for you and your business.

There is no doubt about it, one of the most difficult things for entrepreneurs to do is choosing a new business partner when the time comes to expand or move into new territories. After all, it’s like entering into a marriage of sorts, so it’s important to try and get it right first time around. Here are five traits to look out for when trying to find that new partner in your business. Firstly, it all starts with trust - you need to be convinced that this person is trustworthy and can be relied upon at all times with all aspects of the business. Secondly, do they come to the party with the skills, strengths and knowledge that you lack - do they have something valuable to offer. Thirdly, do they possess a great attitude to working hard to make the business succeed. Fourthly, is their personality compatible with yours - trust your initial gut-reaction here! Finally, do you feel they will be supportive, in good times and bad. Ultimately, it’s a personal as well as a business decision, and it’s one that needs to be right for you and the business.

Everyone talks about the importance of great communication skills in business, but one of the most underrated of those skills is listening. In a world full of distractions and where we are permanently connected to our technology in one way or another, the art of listening is being lost. And yet, it can be a very powerful asset to any business. It’s crucial to listen to customers, to get their feedback, and to incorporate those learnings into future product or service development. It’s important to keep a close ear on developments in a particular industry sector that is key to the success of your business. And, it’s vital to listen to your employees, to gain their insights, and to ensure they stay motivated and committed to helping achieve the business vision and mission. The ability to listen in business is one that can pay dividends in the long-run, so it’s worth mastering the art of listening at an early stage.

For many entrepreneurs, finding a space or niche in which to build a successful business that can thrive is often the most difficult challenge. The temptation is always there to follow the trends and jump on a particular product or service bandwagon. Yet the theories first written about in Blue Ocean Strategy, the groundbreaking marketing theory book written in 2005 by professors W Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, remain true today. Businesses that can create "blue oceans" of uncontested market space, as opposed to "red oceans" where competitors fight for dominance, are more likely to be successful. There is a great story about global fashion designer turned entrepreneur, Mindy Scheier, creator of the Runway of Dreams Foundation, who was inspired by Blue Ocean theory. Her son was born with a rare form of muscular dystrophy, making it hard for him to find fashionable and functional clothing. Through her personal experiences with him, she realised that mainstream adaptive clothing was a wide-open 'blue ocean' of opportunity for her to create a unique business. It was a game-changing moment, So, which ocean do you want to swim in with your business?

Any successful business knows that to attract and retain the best people and the best clients, it takes a winning culture - one that celebrates success and recognizes the people who help the business to get there. So how do you create that all important winning culture in a fledgling business? It starts with encouraging everyone in the business, from founders to shareholders, full-time employees to freelancers, to share their new ideas and to bring them into the business to help it grow. It continues by acknowledging every day the small acts of innovation that help make the business better and more creative. It builds by making every person that is part of the business journey feel valued and an integral part of making the mission and vision a reality. That’s how you create a winning culture in the business.

Okay, so we know that entrepreneurs have a reputation for being workaholics - it’s often a necessity to put in some seriously long hours in the early days of building any business. But it’s also important to ensure that burnout doesn’t happen as that’s a surefire way to lose drive, momentum and ultimately fail to reach goals. So, the best way of avoiding that situation is to remember to have fun with your business. Build in regular breaks into your working week to refresh your mind, body and spirit. Bring some fun into the business through new project brainstorming. Or find fun new ways of developing and experimenting with new products. It’s all about keeping it fresh, remembering why you became an entrepreneur in the first place, and making time to have fun in your business. As Richard Branson says, “If you aren’t having fun, you are doing it wrong. If you feel like getting up in the morning to work on your business is a chore, then it’s time to do something else.”

If you read or watch the news each morning as part of your regular routine, you cannot fail to be reminded that so much of what happens around us is out of our control, whether it’s interest rate hikes, economic downturns, political uncertainty, etc. Sure, all of these things can affect our businesses in one way or another, but the trick to survival and growth is to focus your attention on what you can control, not on what you can’t. Taking this pragmatic approach, you are far more likely to experience success. Practically look for ways that you can control the outcome, or change your approach so that you increase your chances of success. Of course, there will still be the occasional curveball that you were not expecting, but you can still control your response, and there will always be something you can control to change your trajectory. And anyway, when life does throw you the inevitable lemons, just make lemonade!

Read the stories of so-called ‘overnight successes’ in business and chances are they really happened over a long period of time, taking lots of hard work and sacrifice behind the scenes in the process. Success comes from putting in the hard yards and laying a strong foundation for sustained business over time. It’s about creating the right products and services at the right time; it’s about getting out there and marketing your business every day, rain or shine; it’s about getting noticed in the marketplace and winning customer hearts and minds. Hopefully, after lots of hard work and energy and ultimately lots of time spent, you reach a critical mass that opens up the marketplace and people start to talk about your business and brand for you, creating that ‘overnight success’ perception. The truth is, as Steve Jobs once said, “If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.”

When was the last time you looked at your customer list, really looked at it, and assessed just how engaged you are with each of them? Engaged customers make for great customers, but that takes work on a regular basis to keep them interested in your business and your products and services. It doesn’t just happen organically. So here are a few practical tips to help you to boost your level of contact and engagement with those precious customers. Firstly, consider a regular e-newsletter, filled with interesting articles on your business and its activities which keeps customers updated on everything you are doing. Secondly, try a regular survey which asks customers for their feedback on how you can serve them better as a business - and, share the findings of those surveys with your customers so they can see how their opinions matter. Thirdly, incorporate feedback mechanisms into your social media activity so customers can share their thoughts on your new products and services as you launch them. Engaging with customers in these ways makes them feel valued and more likely to become your brand ambassadors of the future.

As entrepreneurs, we are all driven by our vision to create a successful life and business for ourselves, but with success comes other challenges. The question is, are you adequately prepared to deal with the way life can change once success arrives? For example, do you have a plan to manage the continual growth of your business, particularly if that growth is rapid, including having a strategy to manage your people? Are you personally prepared to deal with the added responsibilities of managing a bigger business? Are you emotionally prepared to deal with all the stresses and strains that come as part and parcel of building a high growth business? Life as a successful business builder undoubtedly becomes more complicated - the trick is knowing how to prepare for that success, and put in place the building blocks for growth at an early stage, so things don’t catch you out later.

We all know that the life of an entrepreneur is not for everyone, that’s why it is very much a lifestyle choice when embarking on the journey to build a business. When friends and family around you are working 9-5, you are working all hours of the day to make things happen in your business. When others are planning vacations, you are planning how to take your next trip to meet a client and hopefully bring in the next big client. When friends are hanging out in a bar or restaurant as part of their relaxation time, you are at networking events, mixing with fellow entrepreneurs and making valuable future contacts. In the crazy world of entrepreneurship, life and work merge together - the secret is making it work for you so that you can enjoy both facets of your lifestyle choice.

In today’s business world you can have the best products and services, but if your brand ethos is not built on a foundation of a caring company, one that does business but also does good, then your business may not be sustainable. Many research studies have found that today’s consumers are much more likely to make conscious purchasing decisions based on their connection to brands that are caring and committed to good causes. This is certainly the case for the increasingly influential millennial and Gen Z consumers, who take a very different approach to their purchasing decisions. You only have to look at the huge success of purpose-driven brands such as Toms, Warby Parker and Patagonia to see that their back-stories resonate with and influence these consumers directly. Social responsibility makes an emotional connection with customers and today it’s not a nice to have, but a must-have in business.  

If you are in business, and you are out there selling your brand, your products and your services to prospective customers, day in and day out, chances are you will hear the word ‘no’ more often than you hear ‘yes’. It’s all par for the course in the life of an entrepreneur. But you are not alone. Did you know that Huffington Post founder, Ariana Huffington, was rejected by 36 different publishers at the start of her entrepreneurial journey? If that wasn’t enough, she ran for public office in the US against Arnold Schwarzenegger for the seat of Governor of the State of California, winning only 0.55% of the votes at the time - that’s also a fairly big public rejection to get over. Yet she was inspired by the words of her mother who said: “Failure is not the opposite of success, but a stepping stone to success.” Ariana went on to famously to create one of the world’s most successful blogging platforms, write 13 books, and secure her position as one of the world’s most influential women. Now, that’s how to deal with rejection!

We all do it as entrepreneurs - we avidly watch how the very successful business builders are getting it right, how they are marketing their products to the world, and how they build sustainable brands that resonate with customers. Often, the temptation is there to try and emulate their success by replicating the way they do things in our own businesses. But it’s important to remember that those entrepreneurs got it right by forging their own paths, doing things their own way - being leaders not followers. Success comes when we recognize that it is precisely what makes us unique that resonates with others, and that goes for our businesses, products and brands too. There is a great quote by the legendary writer Jack Kerouac who says: “When writing the story of your life, don’t let anyone else hold the pen.” It’s all about following your own unique entrepreneurial path.

Do you sometimes feel like that proverbial ‘hamster on the wheel’? You just keep running but never seem to get to where you need to be each day. You are not alone! As entrepreneurs we are in a perpetual state of multi-tasking, and that is not always a recipe for maximum productivity. It’s all about working smarter each day. Start by harnessing the power of technology to minimize repetitive chores. Scheduling tools are great if you have repetitive tasks that have to be done at key times each day - you can prepare everything in advance and then automatically schedule those tasks to be done automatically. It’s the same with social media posts - you can automate and preschedule all your social media content, so once it’s created you don’t have to think about it. Cut down on all unnecessary meetings and extraneous travel, and use online virtual meetings when you really have to speak directly to someone. Finally, set aside a designated quiet time at the end of each day to prepare for the next day’s work. That’s how to squeeze the most out of your workday!

Staying on trend in the social media space is key to any marketing and communications strategy for a business, so why not get those trends and insights from those in the know. The latest Internet Trends report by Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has just been published, and as always, it makes for really interesting reading. Here are the top ten social media trends that entrepreneurs need to stay on top of this year.

1. Two billion social media users = a big marketplace
2. Social media is going mobile
3. Social messaging overtook social media
4. Chatbots are becoming the norm
5. Social messaging will greatly benefit business
6. Businesses can no longer afford to ignore social media
7. Organic reach and referral traffic are plummeting
8. Video is still the most popular content type
9. User generated content can help drive reach and engagement
10. Businesses are pouring more money into social ads