Great business tips

Ash Kumra marshals best of 35 entrepreneurs

Irvine based Ash Kumra is an award-winning entrepreneur and public speaker who was recently recognized by the White House as one of the top 100 young entrepreneurs making an impact on America. The current state of entrepreneurship excites Ash and he loves to give tips and guidance on how to be a better entrepreneur. He feels that today there are more available resources, mentors, smart investors and like-minded dreamers and believers with energy to guide one.
And to further help out entrepreneurs Ash has come out with a smartly packaged book “Confessions from an Entrepreneur” volume 1 which gives an inside look on how to be a successful entrepreneur featuring advice from 35 successful individuals. The project features individual and company life lessons from entrepreneurs across all industries, passions, interests, and individual project/pursuit stages.
Among the featured contributors are Dave Berkus, Brad Feld, Wing Lam, Scott Painter, Arel Moodie, Thomas Tadlock and many more.
Wing Lam, co-founder and CEO of Wahoo’s Fish Tacos, a leading restaurant chain with over 50 locations, says the biggest mistake people can make is to spend money that they don’t have. “If you have to go work out of the garage before you start pulling in money, do it. You don’t need an office secretary or a nice building at the beginning. No one cares about that until you’re making actual income. You should be working for free until you make money.”
Brad Feld, Early Stage Investor, Serial Entrepreneur, Author & Speaker, talks of the power of passion when starting a company. You may have a number of business ideas but how do you choose which one to go for? He talks of two amazing guys who are sitting glum because the business ideas which can succeed are not exciting them. But the moment they talk of the “robotic ball you control with your smartphone” their eyes light up. Brad decided to invest in these two crazy kids. “Their passion and obsession around the idea of a robotic ball you control with a smartphone was awesome,” he said. There were many discouraging and skeptical questions about market size and customers.
They kept working on the prototype, and once they could drive something in a sort of straight line, more eyes started lighting up.
Dave Berkus, Super Angel, Speaker, Author & Entrepreneur advises that If you have a life-changing decision to make – including whether to start your entrepreneurial journey – you need to shift to a quiet place where cell phone, text, and other distractions can’t reach you while you dig deeply into a problem or opportunity and really allow yourself to think uninterrupted. He gives his own example of how retreated to a rock in Ensenada in Mexico where he spent hours together to think over his problem of taking the path to entrepreneurship or stay on with a secure job. Once the decision was made it was only a question of working on the logistics.
Scott Painter, CEO of TrueCar asks if you are willing to risk everything! He tells entrepreneurs not to try and make a good idea better. “Know your business and take it seriously because fundraising is an absolute test of whether or not your business has a good reason to exist. And, if you take someone’s money without returning it, you don’t have the right to be an entrepreneur”. He says there are key elements to fundraising that every entrepreneur must know; and the first and foremost is how to “speak investor” because knowing “how to cogently present yourself, your company, and your story can make all the difference.”
Arel Moodie, International Speaker & Author gives out confidence tips to starting out entrepreneurs. He says getting your first few clients is hands-down one of the hardest and most important phases of any business. “If you can get some people to pay you, then you can get more people to pay you. But if you can’t get the first customer, it’s probably a sign that your business (in its current form) has severe flaws.”
He recommends a dodgy kind of “fake it until you make it” solution. “It means that you should be the person you want to be, not the person you currently are. It means you should take what you have currently accomplished and blow it up (however, this secret does not include lying).”

Ash Kumra has done a great service to budding entrepreneurs by stringing together excellent advice and putting it at one place. He claims the book is for
“dreamers, believers, and people like me who want to learn, so they can achieve more. It’s time for those who have done their time to rise up and guide the next generation of entrepreneurs.”
Ash is also a co-founder of digital content distribution agency DesiYou, the 2010 recipient for Best Digital Media Company by the Irvine Entrepreneur Forum. Ash is an active adviser to various consumer internet ventures.

Vinod Dhawan 
India Post News Service