I'm not here to tell you what your average needs to be, but it would seem to me that one way to protect yourself, as an entrepreneur, from the dreaded average is to understand what that looks like in your industry, your business, and your personal life and take the steps to be above average.
I've always enjoyed shopping and loved fashion, but my interest as an entrepreneur was definitely more about the opportunities I saw to change the future of retail. My sister was a buyer in New York, and she knew my body and my style, and she could find me things I loved. I thought, 'What if everybody had access to this kind of experience?'
I'm an entrepreneur. 'Ambitious' is my middle name.
Your goal as an entrepreneur is to understand not only what your business does but the clients that it serves. If you really have your pulse on their needs and wants, then your 'absolute' failures are always going to have limits.
The link between my experience as an entrepreneur and that of a politician is all in one word: freedom.
Dad was a pure entrepreneur. The dinner conversations weren't like, 'Did the Yankees win today?'
To be a designer today is to be an entrepreneur. Whether you're a two-man operation in Shoreditch or a 3,000-person, vertically integrated brand, you need to have the wherewithal to run your business through investment, considering everything from start-up funds to your exit plan or what it takes to go public.
At Virgin, we have always backed the power of the entrepreneur and inventor to find solutions to tricky problems. Why should climate change and the battle against carbon be any different?
I'd rather invest in an entrepreneur who has failed before than one who assumes success from day one.
I am not a politician. I'm an American businessman and entrepreneur that have built two businesses, and I try to play it straight with people.
Being an entrepreneur is a mindset. You have to see things as opportunities all the time. I like to do interviews. I like to push people on certain topics. I like to dig into the stories where there's not necessarily a right or wrong answer.
As an entrepreneur, I have been known for taking risks throughout my career, but leaving the European Union is not one of the risks I would want the U.K. to take - not as an investor, not as a father, and not as a grandfather. I am deeply concerned about the impact of leaving.
It's a common misconception that money is every entrepreneur's metric for success. It's not, and nor should it be.
Being an entrepreneur is tough. Really, really tough.
I don't want to be known as a serial entrepreneur. I like doing one thing at a time and making sure that gets my full attention until it's well established. I enjoy the initial years of a company because they are the most dynamic, and that is when I can give the best of myself.
My father was a successful entrepreneur.
Most venture capitalists won't read a business plan unless the entrepreneur is introduced to them by a contact.
A lesson learned, both in the SEAL teams and as an entrepreneur, is that failure is sometimes a critical component of success.
When I finished school, I took my entire life savings - $5,000 - and invested it in a business. I was young. I was inexperienced. But I was an entrepreneur, and I was proud. And in six weeks, I was broke.
As an entrepreneur and a small business owner, you are intimately familiar with goals. You've dreamed of the 'right' ones, you've projected 'real' ones for the banker and the investor, and, secretly, you've imagined how life can be if you can reach the ones you've set.
A black entrepreneur has to be equally if not more prepared than a white to get his fair share of loan money.
It's harder, but we're still finding oil in Oklahoma today. The bar has been raised on startup companies, but it can still be done. Every regulation and every rule limits you, but, yes, it can still be done. That's the beauty of living in a free country and having the freedom to have an idea and become an entrepreneur.
To have real success and roots in a society, there has to be a local champion, and hence we believe in identifying a local entrepreneur.
Being an entrepreneur means the ability to think out of the box by putting away our fear of any risk, including financial.
Growing up in a group home, and with an undiagnosed learning disability to boot, the odds of success were not on my side. But when I joined the high school football team, I learned the value of discipline, focus, persistence, and teamwork - all skills that have proven vital to my career as a C.E.O. and social entrepreneur.
I consider myself an inventor first and an entrepreneur second. In real life, my hero is Thomas Edison. He was a great inventor, but also an outstanding entrepreneur who was able to sell his inventions to the masses. He didn't just develop the light bulb; he invented the entire electric grid and power distribution system.
As an entrepreneur, one cannot just work and not say anything.
Every entrepreneur talks about the passion you have for your work, and I think that's what's missing with a lot of women in business.
Giving customers and prospects a glimpse into the entrepreneur's life and mindset can allow them to cultivate a deeper relationship with customers separately from the brand.
Once you meet an entrepreneur like Jack Ma, you just want to make sure you bet on him. It's not a hard decision.
An entrepreneur is someone who brings a pattern change.
It's the combination: big idea with a good entrepreneur: there's nothing more powerful.
An entrepreneur needs to know what they need, period. Then they need to find an investor who can build off whatever their weaknesses are - whether that's through money, strategic partnerships or knowledge.
I'd like to see the word 'entrepreneur' knocked off its pedestal. Being 'entrepreneurial' is something I look for not only in founders to invest in, but also employees to hire.
But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you're confident that you'll catch a bird flying by. It's an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn't come by, but a few times it does.
As any good entrepreneur will tell you, it's much harder to acquire a user a second time after a bad product experience than it is to acquire them the first time.
