Building a business is always the dream path of every innovative soul, but it is not an easy road, especially startup when being a student. It takes lots of preparation and effort to persevere on this journey. Today, let’s find out 7 startup advice for young people that are cherishing the dream of starting their own business!
Find opportunities in your daily work
Opportunity might come from any moment in daily life. The importance is whether you realize it or not. For instance, when doing IT consulting, ENOUVO has a lot of clients building MVP products so we have to do many things, from ideation, design thinking, to development and shipping the product for them. During that time, we’ve realized that we have the potential of bringing MVP products to the market by providing services of graphic design and digital marketing. We’ve built a team doing these services for our clients after they’ve done the development of the product. Thus, the Enosta agency was born.
Build up your skillset
Nobody becomes an entrepreneur in one day. It requires a long time to collect experiences, build up the knowledge and strengthen your skills. In the beginning, you can learn as an employee how to make a product, what technologies the company you’re working for uses, their experiences and how to collaborate with other people. From there you will get the basic knowledge and skills to build your own team.
However, the learning does not stop here. Through difficulties and shortcomings in the process of team development, you will know which aspects you need to learn more about and develop your own skillset. Like the founders of ENOUVO, they started out as developers, so they didn’t have much knowledge about business administration, human resource management or financial planning, etc. They slowly learned new things during the development of ENOUVO. This process takes a lot of time and effort, but it is necessary.
Start as soon as possible
If you want to start a business, start right from the time you are still a student. You can start with small ideas to solve problems in daily life. Of course, you don’t have enough money to build a business at that time (unless your parents are billionaires) so you can test your ideas in contests like Hackathons, StartUp competitions or similar activities. Your ideas might be impractical, steps might be wrong, and the process might be unoptimized but it doesn’t matter. You can learn from your mistakes and have valuable experiences. Therefore, the earlier you start, the more you will learn and put your skills into practice.
Start planning from the very beginning
Planning helps you decide what is necessary for your development. For example, if you want a stable job, applying to big companies will guarantee you that. All processes are optimized and your role is fixed. You just need to focus on your work. However, you won’t get a chance to try new things.
On the other hand, if you want to be a business owner, you might consider working at startups after graduating. In this environment, you have to do a lot of things due to the limitation of human resources. You apply to be a developer but may do the work of Tester and DevOps as well. It forces you to find ways to optimize resources and collaborate with colleagues to complete projects. Thus, it motivates you to learn and progress faster. You will have enough experience to start your own startup earlier.
Build your team effectively
When you build a team, there is always a stage of Forming where the team first meet and know each other. After that, you will come to the Storming stage. Unless you have an angel in your team, most of the teams have to experience this stage.
Team members will disagree, have conflicts, argue different directions on doing things. Your priority, as a team lead, is to find the way to go to the Norming stage as fast as possible. Conflicts are obvious, but how to resolve the conflicts depends on the team lead as well as team members. “Why they think that way?”, “Why we think this way?”, pros and cons of each solutions, etc. everybody have to put ego down and try to understand each other. Thus, the team will find own way to effectively communicate.
If your team can overcome this hardship, you will come to the Norming stage where people are truly understand each other, and steadily move on to the Performing stage where people start doing the best at their work. Many Startups fail at the Storming stage because people hide their disagreements, keep silence and pretend to be normal. However, working without the same direction and vision will separate the team.
Learn how to work with other people
The hardest thing in management is not how to create the best product, but how to manage people. You have to find the way to optimize human resources, meet their expectations, create incentives and maintain it to help people work happily. In nowadays, you can learn everything from the Internet with top experts in every field. However, common ways to work with others is something you cannot learn because each person has a unique personality and desires. You can only experience it by yourself and draw your own lessons.
Think about the culture and core values of your company
If you want to build a business, think about core values that you want your company have from now. It should be a culture where people can stick together. It’s a good way to motivate work and contribute value to the company. Because as the company grows, so will they grow.
And those are 7 advice to startup when being a student. If you want to watch more details, check out the video of Enouvo Hub where the CEO of ENOUVO – Mrs Trang Tran shares her 10-year experience in building ENOUVO Group.
