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Humanizing Brands: The Impact of User-Centered Marketing
14 de May de 2024
How to Carry Out Your Entrepreneurial Idea: First Steps
“Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye,” as writer Dorothy Parker once said. Many of the most successful entrepreneurial ideas have been born from this blend of a good idea, along with execution, perseverance, and discipline. Yes, talent is great, but if it’s not nurtured, it withers away. That’s why we want to help you bring to life that entrepreneurial idea that’s been bouncing around your head for days, weeks, or even months. We’ll accompany you in those initial steps that can be both exciting and a bit confusing. With that dilemma in mind —how to start, where to begin, what to do, what not to do— we’ll try to explore how to launch a business from scratch.
We have uncovered the steps taken by entrepreneur Jaime Perozo, co-founder of La Santa, a company dedicated to the development of brand sponsorships and activations.
He told us that his mission is “to be the sponsorship department or complement to the sponsorship department that companies cannot have internally. We connect brands with events, properties and ambassadors and we develop a customized sponsorship plan based on the client’s needs.”
“We mainly focus on four areas: sports, music, gastronomy, and sustainability. It’s the combination of our passions and the territories we have been working on for many years.”
First Steps Guide to Entrepreneurship
Sometimes, the energy and focus of human beings can seem capricious: jumping from one thing to another, getting scattered, being everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Creative and entrepreneurial ideas can also work this way sometimes — you like multiple areas, have a variety of passions and possess abilities and skills in different sectors.
Let’s break down the steps to be able to build and bring our idea to life:
First Steps Guide to Entrepreneurship
Sometimes, the energy and focus of human beings can seem capricious: jumping from one thing to another, getting scattered, being everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Creative and entrepreneurial ideas can also work this way sometimes — you like multiple areas, have a variety of passions and possess abilities and skills in different sectors.
Let’s break down the steps to be able to build and bring our idea to life:
First Step: Define your idea
Maybe, upon reading this, you may have thought: “What? Just one idea? Impossible! I like so many things!” But this first step has a great advantage: it allows you to start and test. When you try to launch several ideas at once without first testing, you assume a significant risk — wasting time. The sooner you start and test, the sooner you can detect what needs improvement, what works and what you shouldn’t do in your business.
Tips for defining your entrepreneurial idea
- Get your ideas out of your mind and onto paper — or your computer. In other words, make them real. This will allow you, first of all, to make them tangible. You’ll be able to observe them up close, as if you were in a museum in front of a painting. It will allow you to have a more objective view, which is very important. Sometimes, ideas can be wonderful while they are in our minds, but when we try to put them into practice, we realize that they may require certain amounts of time or money that we’re not able to come by in the short term.
- Immerse yourself in your passions, talents and skills. This is an exciting, enjoyable and even surprising part of the process because you may discover fascinating aspects of your personality that you can incorporate into your entrepreneurial pursuits. In this regard, we would like to share some questions with you: What do you do in your free time and where do you invest time and energy when it’s voluntary? Do people in your circle often turn to you for advice or guidance on a particular topic?
- Revisit your childhood. We propose this creative exercise: go back for a moment to when you were a child. What did you love doing? Was there a particular activity you wanted to try and your parents didn’t support you? By answering these questions, you may find a thread to pull on and see where it takes you.
Second Step: Who’s your target audience?
One thing is crucial: don’t fall in love with your idea. What does this mean? Don’t just focus on the product, service or experience that you would like to buy or consume. Instead, research the profile or buyer persona that you’re targeting: What’s their personal and professional situation like? What’s their demographic profile — gender, age, income, location, social class? What do they do in their free time? Do they listen to podcasts, read books, play sports? What do they need? More time, more income, specific knowledge, better work conditions?
Also, investigate what could be the main objections of your target audience regarding your product or service: what scares them?
Having this information will allow you to focus more specifically on the person you are targeting and provide them with solutions to their problems, also known as “pain points”, which they are willing to pay for you to solve.
In order to keep all this information organized and not just in your head, you could create a buyer persona template where you can go question by question to gather all the necessary information.
Jaime provides us with insight into the relationship with your clients: “For me, the most important thing in a professional relationship is closeness. We create special projects, and to do that, we have to draw from human connection. This is the only way to convey these values to the brands we speak for.”
“Action leads to action, refers to the fact that we’re the only ones responsible for the results. It is as dizzying as it is fantastic: we have the power to make things happen or not — and my experience tells me that if you go out looking for it with conviction, you’ll end up finding it”
Third Step: Research the competition
It’s time to bring out the magnifying glass. It’s time to investigate other businesses that offer something similar to what you do. Some people get discouraged or frustrated at this point, thinking that “everything has already been invented” or arguing that “the market is saturated.” However, new startups, businesses and companies constantly emerge with an offer for something that, although already exists, they’ve been able to turn around.
Jaime believes that the most important thing to work on in any business is differentiation. What makes our product/service different and therefore why would someone buy from me and not from the competition? In my case, I come from a very specialized background in sponsorships and the fact that an agency is dedicated to such a specific area can be very attractive to potential clients. However, it took many years of getting to know, analyzing and working in a highly specialized sector to reach this conclusion.
Furthermore, he believes that differentiation can be “a person, an attribute, the time it takes, or the price. The important thing is to find that differentiation, focus on it and communicate it correctly.”
To offer something original, you must first thoroughly understand other businesses in your sector: what they do, in what formats, how they communicate and what makes them special. By knowing them in-depth, you will be able to see if it can be improved.
To do this we suggest visiting the company’s website or social media and reflecting on your first impression. Ask yourself questions: What do they convey? Trust? Elegance? Seriousness? Is their website original or innovative? How do they communicate what they offer? Is their content organized in a manner that is easy to understand? Does this website invite you to stay and navigate or do you feel like leaving?
Fourth Step: Start, test and forget about perfection
“Action leads to action,” says Jaime when asked about the moment when one procrastinates starting a business until everything is perfect. He also shares his stance and perspective on this: “My way of dealing with this is through imperfection. We’re not perfect and we don’t do everything right, but we must try to do it in the best possible way. The path of entrepreneurship is a constant learning process. If you approach it with arrogance, you lose. If you approach it with absorption, you’re likely to improve. We’re surrounded by people who have started businesses and succeeded, the question is: Why shouldn’t I be up to par?”
Start, test and readjust along the way.
Fifth Step: “You don’t have to abandon everything to become an entrepreneur”
Jaime emphasizes that, if you want to start a business, it’s not necessary to abandon everything else. He suggests having a “safety net” so that financial need doesn’t become a barrier to your creation, nor drain the energy that will be necessary to focus on your business. “I believe that taking the step to start a business needs to be accompanied by a solid commitment. When you create your own project, you don’t need to leave everything else behind. But we do need to know that, if we want it to work, it will require a lot of our attention and effort. We need to understand that, at some point, it will require our main attention. And that’s a decision you must make in advance,” he suggests.
Furthermore, Jaime explains that in his case he gave up “certain things in life, but with the conviction that it would be temporary: leisure, trips and an imminent return to the family home to reduce fixed costs.”
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Jaime is firm in this regard: it’s important that entrepreneurship doesn’t occupy all your space and that you pay special attention to what’s really important to you, such as your family, your group of friends, your hobbies, passions, preferred activities and your health. “Workdays now have no set hours, and many days the last thing you want to do is exercise or chat with people, but I assure you that after doing it, it’s always worth it and it shows the next day.”
“There’s no exact route. It’s an exploration: there’s a jungle and with machetes you cut through the weed. Sometimes you come across an idyllic waterfall and sometimes you come across a snake”
Seventh Step: Learn to live with frustration and increase your threshold of tolerance for it
Frustration is a key part of the entrepreneurial process. As a process, it has its own stages, rhythms and timelines. Trying to achieve immediate or quick results can lead to frustration. Jaime shared with us how he copes with frustration and his way of managing it: “Entrepreneurship isn’t a defined path to follow. There’s no exact route. It’s an exploration: there’s a jungle and with machetes you cut through the weed. Sometimes you come across an idyllic waterfall and sometimes you come across a snake. It’s okay: you’re there because you want to be and you have to be consistent with what you want. The most important thing is to keep trying. As long as you keep fighting —cutting through the weed and trying to find the best route—, you’ll be on the right path. Keeping up your motivation is one of the great challenges of entrepreneurship and the best way to deal with frustrating situations is acceptance.”
