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Entrepreneur
6 days ago
- Business
- Entrepreneur
10 Things That Separate Successful Founders From the Unsuccessful
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Success isn't an accident. It's the result of deliberate, consistent habits practiced day in and day out. Over the course of my five-year Rich Habits study, what I discovered was a clear divide in habits that successful entrepreneurs embraced and unsuccessful ones ignored. If you're an entrepreneur aiming to build a thriving business, these ten habits can set you apart from the pack. Join top CEOs, founders and operators at the Level Up conference to unlock strategies for scaling your business, boosting revenue and building sustainable success. 1. Successful entrepreneurs dream big and set goals Successful entrepreneurs are dreamers who take massive action on their dreams. In my study, 80% of wealthy entrepreneurs had clearly defined goals, compared to only 12% of those struggling financially. They write down their dreams and break them into daily tasks. Unsuccessful entrepreneurs, on the other hand, lack focus or have vague ideas and are unable to commit to a plan of action. 2. They build relationships daily Relationships are the true currency of the successful. Successful entrepreneurs dedicate time every day to nurturing their network, calling clients, mentoring employees or connecting with mentors. My research showed that 88% of wealthy entrepreneurs, on a daily basis, actively built relationships, while only 17% of the unsuccessful did the same. A simple hello call, life event call or happy birthday call can open doors to partnerships or opportunities. Unsuccessful entrepreneurs often isolate themselves, neglecting the power of a strong network. 3. They read to learn, not to escape Successful entrepreneurs are lifelong learners. In my study, 85% of the wealthy read 30 minutes or more daily, focusing on self-improvement, industry trends, or business strategies. They consume books by other entrepreneurs to gain insights. Unsuccessful entrepreneurs, by contrast, read mostly for entertainment or not at all — only 11% engaged in daily self-education reading. Related: 7 Books Most Millionaires Read Before They Turn 30 4. They take calculated risks Successful entrepreneurs do not take speculative risks. Rather, they take what I call analytical risk — they analyze, research and weigh options before taking action. In my study, 91% of wealthy entrepreneurs said they took analytical risks, often piloting ideas on a small scale before rolling their product or service out to the world. Unsuccessful entrepreneurs either avoid risks altogether, are paralyzed by fear or take speculative risks, not doing the homework, like successful entrepreneurs do. This causes mistakes and costs them precious working capital. 5. They wake up early and maximize their day Successful entrepreneurs start their day early — 67% of the wealthy in my study woke up at least three hours before their workday began. They use this time for planning, exercise or creative thinking. Unsuccessful entrepreneurs often sleep in or waste mornings, leaving them reactive instead of proactive. Getting a head start gives successful entrepreneurs an edge in productivity. 6. They focus on one thing at a time Multitasking is a myth. Successful entrepreneurs practice single-tasking, pouring their energy into one project or goal until it's complete. My research found that 81% of wealthy entrepreneurs focused on one major objective at a time, compared to just 19% of the unsuccessful. 7. They want feedback and embrace criticism Successful entrepreneurs actively seek feedback from customers, mentors, and peers to improve their products or services. In my study, 79% of wealthy entrepreneurs valued constructive criticism, using it to refine their approach. Unsuccessful entrepreneurs often take feedback personally or avoid it altogether, missing opportunities to grow. Embracing criticism isn't easy, but it's a hallmark of those who succeed. 8. They exercise and prioritize health Running a business is a marathon, not a sprint. Successful entrepreneurs know that physical and mental health fuel their performance. My research showed that 76% of the wealthy exercised aerobically for 30 minutes or more daily, compared to only 23% of the unsuccessful. They also eat healthier, avoiding junk food that saps energy. Unsuccessful entrepreneurs often neglect their health, leading to burnout or diminished focus. A strong body supports a strong business. Related: 9 Habit Stacking Routines to Boost Your Productivity 9. They persist through adversity and failure Failure is inevitable in entrepreneurship, but successful entrepreneurs view it as a learning opportunity. In my study, 84% of wealthy entrepreneurs said they had faced significant setbacks but kept going, pivoting when needed to alter their strategies or processes. Unsuccessful entrepreneurs often give up after a single failure, letting fear or discouragement take over. Persistence turns dreams into reality. 10. They control their emotions Entrepreneurship is an emotional rollercoaster. Successful entrepreneurs stay calm under pressure, making decisions based on logic rather than on emotion. My research found that 94% of the wealthy practiced emotional discipline, compared to just 15% of the unsuccessful. Successful entrepreneurs stay composed and solution-focused. Unsuccessful entrepreneurs let emotions drive their decisions, leading to mistakes. Success as an entrepreneur isn't about being the smartest or the most connected. It's about doing what unsuccessful entrepreneurs won't. Pick one habit from this list and commit to it for 30 days. Track your progress in a journal, just like 62% of the wealthy in my study did. Small, consistent steps will transform your business — and your life. The Rich Habits aren't magic; they're a blueprint. Start building yours today.
Entrepreneur
7 days ago
- Business
- Entrepreneur
3 Tactics to Turn One-Time Holiday Shoppers Into Year-Round Buyers
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Every winter, retailers watch revenue lines spike and then flatten again by February. What often goes unexamined is the potential of turning one-time holiday shoppers into lifelong fans of your brand. Just last year, U.S. consumers spent an average $902 a piece on winter‑holiday purchases — a surge of wallets wide open and, crucially, minds open to new brands. While the holiday sales rush is fantastic, its actual value doesn't just revolve around the immediate profit. It's in the people who are discovering your brand for the first time. And that opportunity doesn't start in December; it starts months earlier. Many successful brands begin preparing their holiday playbook in August, laying the groundwork with campaigns and messaging that build awareness and prime new customers before the season peaks. A small effort to convert these new holiday buyers into loyal customers can extend that seasonal success throughout the entire year. This conversion playbook is comprised of three key parts. When brands execute all three, Q4 turns from a sugar rush into an on‑ramp for steady, compounding growth. Join top CEOs, founders and operators at the Level Up conference to unlock strategies for scaling your business, boosting revenue and building sustainable success. 1. Promote products that reflect your brand DNA Big discounts on basics can make December's sales chart look great — and many shoppers are indeed hoping to snag a holiday deal. The opportunity lies in making sure those customers stick around long after prices reset. By pairing promotions with a clear expression of your brand's identity, you can turn seasonal shoppers into loyal advocates. One of the best ways to do this is by spotlighting your "hero" products — the pieces that showcase your signature materials, craftsmanship or design flair. When someone's first purchase feels unmistakably you, every future drop feels consistent and compelling, not like a bait‑and‑switch. You can further strengthen that connection by inviting new buyers into your loyalty program or offering follow‑up perks that keep them engaged. A customer whose introduction to your brand is authentic and rewarding is far more likely to come back, at full price, in the months ahead. Timing helps, too. Brands that start acquisition campaigns in August or September give shoppers time to learn the story, budget for full‑price pieces and hit November already warmed up. Those early birds come back during peak season, and they do it at healthy margins because their loyalty was never built on discounts in the first place. Related: 5 Black Friday Strategies to Turn Holiday Browsers into Instant Buyers 2. Make loyalty part of the purchase, not an afterthought A solid loyalty program is the simplest way to turn a first‑time buyer into a repeat customer, yet too many brands hide it in the website footer, where no one sees it. That "strategy" is expensive. In fact, 85% of shoppers say a strong program makes them buy again, and 79% go on to advocate for the brand. This means you must put the invitation where excitement peaks. That's usually on the product page, in the mini‑cart, and right after checkout, so shoppers understand the value before their order even ships. Just as important, the sign‑up process should feel effortless. Tuckernuck, for example, weaves loyalty seamlessly throughout the customer journey. Shoppers can join by simply entering their email address at checkout or at any time while browsing. Once enrolled, customers see their reward points in real time, clearly displayed across the site, without needing to navigate away or search for a separate page. This keeps the program visible and reinforces that being a part of Tuckernuck's community is central to the experience year‑round. Ultimately, even if your full program is still on the drawing board, act now. Flag high‑spend holiday buyers as a temporary "VIP" group and thank them with first dibs on a limited January release. Track which perks drive clicks, carts and redemptions to shape your database's program. Bottom line, make sure every December shopper leaves knowing there's a real reason to come back to you in, say, February or March. 3. Segment holiday buyers into micro‑audiences Holiday crowds are anything but uniform. The shopper who grabs a $29 stocking stuffer after spotting your TikTok ad won't respond to the same January follow-up that works for the customer who spent $280 on a purse they found in a print gift guide. Offering a one-size-fits-all program is clearly a missed opportunity. Instead, tag each holiday order by first-touch channel, cart value and product type. Once those labels are in place, your automations can generate more personalized messages without increasing your manual workload. This results in brands generating roughly 40% more revenue than their peers, and the American Marketing Association notes that a well-targeted email can increase revenue by up to 5.7 times. Those gains come from small, data-driven touches, such as subject lines that name-check the very collection a shopper browsed and replenishment reminders timed to average usage cycles. Related: 25 Ways You Can Turn a One-Time Buyer Into a Repeat Buyer Win the holidays even before they begin If the first time you talk retention is after the pumpkins from Halloween hit the porch, you're already scrambling. Best practice is to lock the plan by mid‑August, which is early enough to run list‑building ads while costs are still reasonable. This also gives you enough wiggle room to test your signup pop‑ups and fine‑tune the loyalty messaging you'll weave into every holiday touchpoint. By September, your email and SMS automations should be live, your VIP segments tagged and your "second‑purchase" offers queued up. That way, when traffic surges in November, all you do is hit "go."
Entrepreneur
30-07-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
3 Things I Wish I Knew When Founding a Company 20 Years Ago
If I could sit down with a new B2B founder today, these are the three conversations I'd make sure we had — the same ones I wish someone had with me early on. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Twenty years ago, I launched my company with a head full of optimism and a thin playbook. The market was smaller, capital was scarcer, and the word "scale" usually referred to manufacturing, not software. Let me save you twenty years. Through three recessions, a pandemic and a Russian hack I'll never forget, I learned that every outcome — good and bad — was dictated by three things: approach to equity, obsession with speed and commitment to building for the future, not just the present. If I could sit down with a new B2B founder today, these are the three conversations I'd make sure we had — the same ones I wish someone had with me early on. Join top CEOs, founders and operators at the Level Up conference to unlock strategies for scaling your business, boosting revenue and building sustainable success. 1. Don't give it all away Early on, most founders pay their first hires in equity. Each grant solves an immediate payroll problem but also sets the "going rate" for everyone who follows and nibbles away at the founder's ownership. Over time, as more hires come on board expecting similar equity deals, the option pool expands, and suddenly, there's not enough left to offer meaningful stakes to the senior leaders who matter most for the company's next phase of growth. To fix this imbalance, you must recognize that you have precisely one window to fix it, and that's now. It means having the hard conversations about revisiting vesting, adding performance cliffs and making room for future partners. The pain of doing it now is nothing compared to the pain of explaining a broken cap table to new investors. We survived a similar case because we ripped that band-aid off, just before our next round made it impossible to do so. Today, I tell founders to treat equity like a reserved seat at the board table: only give it to people whose judgment you'll still respect a decade later. If only I had known that timing and value alignment in equity partnerships mattered so much, I would have saved myself countless hours of renegotiation had it been available back then. Related: 3 Things to Consider Before Going 'All in' on Your Startup 2. Move faster than feels comfortable Another blind spot for most founders is velocity, which goes unnoticed until it starts costing real money. Founders who insist on flawless forecasts and endless debate often end up watching the market sprint ahead while their projects idle in "analysis" mode. It's crucial to remember that most opportunities have a shelf life, and the price of hesitation usually outweighs the cost of a measured mistake. With that in mind, I had to make sure our teams embrace a bias toward action. Each year, we challenge ourselves to shorten our decision-to-execution cycle. We concentrate on the highest-payoff priorities, make the call, and then move immediately. While we may inevitably miss the mark at times, we correct them faster than we once made them. Clearly, there's no substitute for experience. The older I get, and the more seasoned our leadership team becomes, the quicker we can weigh risks, spot patterns and avoid analysis paralysis. That pace creates its own momentum. Once speed becomes the expected culture, your team instinctively builds processes to protect it. So when early-stage founders ask me how fast they should move, my answer is always faster than you think, and then faster still. Related: What Every B2B Brand Should Be Doing to Earn Trust in 2025 3. Build like you're already big In hindsight, we made the classic mistake of building to match the previous quarter's demand instead of our initial goals. We told ourselves that fifty customers was a stretch, so we provisioned servers, support seats and deployment scripts for a company that size — nothing more. As we started to scale, sales momentum started inching us closer and closer towards the ambitious 5,000-site mark we'd only daydreamed about. Many founders discover, right in the middle of a launch, that an early single-tenant setup and bare-bones deployment pipeline won't stretch to meet sudden demand. Deadlines start to drift while the team upgrades to multi-tenant architecture and spins up redundant cloud instances. The extra spend always outruns what a forward-looking investment would have cost, yet the experience makes scaling cheaper while it's still in theory. That's why every roadmap review should open with a simple stress test. For example, for us, "What breaks if we need to bring 150 sites online next month?" — and why budgets must include the infrastructure to pass that test, even when today's revenue makes the line item look ambitious. Planning for surge capacity before it's urgent keeps launches on schedule and turns growth into a feature, not a fire drill. The second truth is that infrastructure alone won't save you; the people building and running it will. Think of your core team as the "founding fathers" of a forever company. You need complementary skill sets, shared loyalty and relationships that hold under pressure because pressure will definitely come. Get that inner circle right, and you'll have the resilience (and the conviction) to keep investing ahead of your growth curve. The uncomfortable math of first principles Looking back across twenty years, I see with perfect clarity how every triumph and setback connects to our first principles. Mind you that those choices were never comfortable in real time as they tug on payroll, patience and budgets that already feel stretched. But that discipline consistently bought us agility. It gave us the freedom to pivot when the market turned and the readiness to jump on a once-in-a-decade chance. That, more than any clever tactic, is how you build an institution designed to outlast its founding story.
Entrepreneur
08-07-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
How I Built a Board That Makes My Business Smarter
Expert advice can be one of your biggest growth accelerators — but only if you know how to access the right people. Here's how to build a trusted inner circle that offers real insight, not just surface-level support. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. I'm going to divulge one of the biggest secrets to building your business. Ready? The more you know, the more you'll grow. That's it. While it may sound trite, the truth is that knowledge is power, and knowing how to leverage that information will be one of the biggest assets you will ever have in expanding your business into a thriving enterprise. But it's not just about reading an exhaustive list of articles, listening to every business podcast or going to countless trade shows. While all of those are important, having a reservoir of expert knowledge you can tap into at every stage of your growth is paramount. What's better quality experiential wisdom than learning from the best of the best? As such, it's very important to have a team of trusted experts and people you can rely on for receiving counsel and to talk things out with — but who you bring to the table is equally important. Join top CEOs, founders and operators at the Level Up conference to unlock strategies for scaling your business, boosting revenue and building sustainable success. Building the best board One great source of experts may be your board of directors. Of course, most venture-backed businesses must have this element; even so, it's an incredibly valuable tool you can use to further your business from many angles. Even if a formal board is not required, I'd recommend building one from the ground up. At its base, it will be composed of people who can provide new insights and make key connections and introductions. For example, you may have someone who is great with partnerships or has a ton of experience raising capital, and tapping into their expertise will be immensely helpful if these are areas where you need guidance. Overall, having someone who has been in your shoes with an emerging business and knows the ropes can be really helpful. Yet the other side of the coin is that, often, a board can be full of third-party representatives of investors and venture capitalists who have provided capital for the business. They may very well have their own agenda and provide bad advice, which only satisfies their bottom line. For this reason, it's always important to corral your own hand-picked advisors or a separate advisory board that you wholeheartedly trust and understand your business's landscape and what you're trying to accomplish. For example, I have a business coach who is probably my most trusted advisor; I rely on him constantly in many situations. The key, however, is to diversify the group so you don't have all the same people sitting around the table saying the same thing. Instead, you want a good variety of viewpoints. Related: Liquid Death Is Worth $1.4 Billion — Because of This Marketing Strategy Finding diverse experts Of course, finding a diverse population of advisors with the expertise you are looking for is not always easy, but there are great resources that can help. Networking is critical: If you're a good networker with long tentacles in the industry, you will always find people wanting to help. You may need to determine how to recoup their time, such as with equity or other offerings, but there will always be interested parties. If you need help growing your circle, visit local business or entrepreneurial networking events and industry-specific trade shows. A great newer option I've found is Hampton, a private network for high-growth founders. Of course, there's also YPO, the Young Presidents' Organization, which is ideal for fostering relationships with other CEOs. Joining these groups can be invaluable for networking opportunities. In all cases, you'll want to gather emails, connect on LinkedIn and don't be shy about talking to people and letting them know what you are looking for. However, one thing to keep in mind is that while you are looking for diverse minds on the board, you should ensure your picks are tangentially relevant. You don't want someone to be so out of the box that there's no throughline. I think of it as filling in blind spots for the business, so you always know how to navigate the road best ahead. The best ways to utilize your inner circle Since board meetings are typically regularly scheduled, it allows you to interface with your advisors on a regular cadence, such as every quarter. Adding an agenda item for knowledge-gathering in these sessions can be helpful, such as asking for introductions with key players, tapping into their networks for connections and seeing what other opportunities they can offer. But it doesn't always have to be this formal. I always have a few board members on call, my most trusted experts, who can be my sounding board and go deep with me on important matters when they happen, because they always will.
