There’s quite a real bit of uncertainty and doubt surrounding any new venture. Being at the cutting edge of any field also means that you’re constantly making guesses about the future. Now that I’m actually facing it all first-hand, I have a renewed respect for game-changing visionaries like Steve Jobs who managed to foresee the future of computing all the way back when he was just a fresh new tech entrepreneur with barely any experience.

How are visionaries born? How do they see what others don’t? Whatever the answers to those questions are, I’ve learnt that one of the biggest obstacles to becoming a true game-changer is figuring out how to overcome your own personal doubts and make your vision of the future a reality.

Right now I’m still trying to learn as much as I can, to work as hard as I can and to do my best to learn the experiences I go through.

Questionnaire

Below’s a short questionnaire for those of you out there who are in sales. Would really appreciate it if you guys could just answer those questions in the comments section below! It’ll really help me out!

Questions:

A. Greeting Cards

1. Do you regularly send greeting cards to your clients?

2. When do you send greeting cards to your clients?

3. Why do you send greeting cards to your clients? What benefits are there for you?

Is it because:

- it increases referral rates?

- helps build rapport with clients?

- leads to repeat sales?

4. What are the problems you face with sending greeting cards to your clients? Do you still think that physical greeting cards are relevant?

B. Building a relationship with your clients

5. How do you stay in contact with your clients? Is it important for you to do so? Does it become a challenge when you have many customers?

6. How do you facilitate referrals from your clients? Is it a challenge or do customers willingly provide referrals? What are your current practices?

7. How do you follow up with your clients? What measures do you currently take to follow up with sales leads? What would make you follow up more?

8. What in your opinion would make your customer remember you?

C. General

9. What kind of help would you enjoy to help you perform your sales job at a higher level?

10. Is it hard to motivate your employees to go the extra mile to build rapport with your customers? What do you currently do to motivate your employees?

Productivity’s been at an all time low as I’ve been running around packing, moving my things, and am actually back in KL for a bit as I’ve just moved out of my home in Singapore for the last 3 years – the halls of NTU. Sigh… got work to be done but the holiday mood back home is really getting to me.

Where progress on my startup is concerned, it’s a double whammy – I’ve thought about some modifications to my startup concept and have ended up redrawing up my plans from scratch.

I’ve flirted with quite a number of startup concepts and ideas over the past two years, but regrettably have not really put in the time and effort into really trying to make something work because I always seemed to find something wrong with the idea at the 11th hour. I don’t have the time for excuses any more, I have to get something done ASAP, or Singapore will literally force me to find a job (or deport me back to KL – permanently).

That’s how bad it gets Kevin. Freaking get out of your holiday mood and start working on that idea already. Gah.

Working on a proper timeline to get everything in check tomorrow morning and submitting it to my project manager to make sure I get things done on time.

Time is precious, lots of it wasted, time to focus.

I was initially planning on writing about how I worked on my business plan for it to reach it’s current state last week but a series of events just threw those plans I made out of the window – I met up with a group of really wise mentors and they persuaded me to look deeper into what makes the business really tick before I really move to the implementing stage. So it’s back to the drawing board for me, but I guess it would be better for me to be slightly late with a better formed, more exciting business plan, rather than one that wasn’t planned well.

So I’m reworking the business plans right now armed with new insights and new directions. It’s pretty scary to have to put the plans you have worked on all aside and start anew, but I guess that’s how it feels like to be working a grand project that you can call your own – quite a lot of the time you’re poking around in the dark and just winging your way through.

Anyway, what I’ve learnt this time is even though life can make it seem like all your effort can go to waste on whim – what’s important is the learning, the experience and the personal improvement life also provides. The more you grow, the better you get, the more likely you are to succeed.

Gotta get over this slump and get working hard again!

This is an amazing presentation that gives amazing insight into the inner workings of a fundable startup! Contrary to popular belief, that a fundable startup should have decent traction, team, product and social proof, Naval goes to argue that a really fundable startup wouldn’t just focus on doing all those decently, but rather focus on making on one of those aspects truly exceptional.

He says it best in this quote of his:

“Investors are trying to find the exceptional outcomes, so they are looking for something exceptional about the company. Instead of trying to do everything well (traction, team, product, social proof, pitch, etc), do one thing exceptional. As a startup you have to be exceptional in at least one regard.”

7th Founder Showcase – Naval Ravikant Keynote from Founder Showcase on Vimeo.

I guess it’s truly a fool’s errand to try to be exceptional in every regard, and that’s why it’s important to understand and focus on one’s strengths. Gotta first get that star team going!

Been really busy covering the necessary work to decide between the two business concepts that I have been working on and after speaking to countless really kind mentors, have finally decided on the one project that will keep me fully occupied in the foreseeable future. I’m really excited about it and hope to share more about it with you guys out there the next couple of weeks!

Weirdly enough, I feel that the amount that I am learning about business has only dramatically increased the moment I graduated and started putting in time to refine my startup concepts! Here are some of the awesome things I’ve recently learnt talking and meeting with the awesome mentors I have around me!

3 Lessons I’ve learnt so far

1. Share your idea with tons of people

Yup, I got that right. If you have an idea that you think is good, share it and don’t just keep it to yourself. I think the media gave us all a totally wrong idea of how business ideas are developed – they’re rarely just born out of a stroke of genius, but much more often than not are the result of refinement based on feedback from mentors, friends and family.

But what if someone steals my idea? Well, that is always a possibility, but trying to get a startup going has made me realize that mere ideas are hardly worth anything – there’s a HUGE AMOUNT OF WORK behind just getting an idea started! On top of that, also note that if you don’t constantly make yourself pitch your idea and bounce your idea off the people around you, you’re very likely to end up not really acting on it and not doing anything further about it!

Overall, it seems much more beneficial to share your idea with fellow friends and mentors that you trust! Don’t just keep it in!

2. Be humble and seek to learn

People are generally really helpful if you respectfully and humbly seek to learn from them. There’s so much to learn in business and sadly, business school does not come close to properly preparing you for the outside world. Therefore, do seek to learn from those more experienced as well as read widely to keep getting better at the things that you do!

The answers to the problems are already out there somehow – someone out there has been likely to have faced them, and even written a book on it! I’ve been really blessed to meet so many awesome mentors whom have taught me so, so much these past few weeks. Reading awesome books like Business Model Generation really helped too!

It’s a wonderful book and I definitely will be sharing some of the key concepts that I’ve used to help refine my business model in the weeks to come!

3. Funding is not your biggest obstacle

When I share my entrepreneurial dreams with the people around me, I keep getting people telling me that they rather work a couple of years to gain experience and capital before they leave to begin a startup. I have written about why I believe that strategy results in experience that is not directly transferrable here, but I’ve also learnt that capital’s probably the least of your worries as well.

Getting investors becomes much, much easier once you have a solid business plan, a synergistic team and a good partner. If your business plan can’t seem to attract experienced investors, you already have a fundamental problem with your business that money will be extremely unlikely to solve anyway!

Remember to…

Post your feedback in the comments section below! Do stay tuned for next Monday’s writeup on my journey in developing a business plan for my startup so far!