6 Common Career Mistakes Millennial Entrepreneurs Make

Millennials are naturally hard-wired to follow their dreams and paths of passion. Unlike the baby boomers who were always more concerned about security and facing any challenges life throws at them, millennials are go-getters.

With so many examples of young entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Elizabeth Holmes, millennials are charged by people’s stories of success, failure, and lessons learned in life.

The generation is, however, more prone to fall trap to several common mistakes during their entrepreneurial attempts. If you are one of them, it is essential to avoid these common mistakes if you want to be a great entrepreneur with a success story to tell.

• No Clear Vision: Having a spectacular idea to begin with is essential. However, it’s not the only puzzle piece that fits into a successful venture. Not having a game plan is going to hurt your chances of future success because you haven’t outlined a clear path to follow.Sometimes, young entrepreneurs have a vague idea of what they want to do, and no idea of how they want to do it. Without a clear focus, an entrepreneur would do things in an unplanned manner and gets no real returns.

• Too much Talking and Less Doing: Great idea, great vision, great goals, awesome! But what’s next? Your ideas are just concepts. People won’t call you credible until you have materialized your ideas and actually achieved your goals. Talking too much about what you want to do and forgetting the do part in the process is a big mistake. In fact, it is recommended that you wait until you have transformed your ideas and dream to reality before you start sharing them – too much.
• Favoring Development over Selling: Focusing too much on the development phase is going ensure that the drive dies down eventually. Quality is important, but it can’t always be favored over quantity. Spending too much time and efforts on designing the perfect product and leaving none for marketing and development are common mistakes young entrepreneurs tend to make.Let’s put it this way; a final product is necessary for marketing. Marketing your product is necessary for selling. Selling is necessary for success. Being stuck on the first step won’t earn you the final reward.

• Not Listening up for Feedback: The key to the success of your business surely lies in what your customers think about your product/service. Put that way, it is of utmost importance to figure out what your customers have to say. You will face setbacks and rejection, but that’s part of business. Young entrepreneurs often forget that they have their customers to cater to and believe themselves to be the real “customer” of the business.Ask customers to help you in the design or development phase. Test a new or better version on a small sample population and ask them for their feedback. Tweak your product until it fits your “ideal customer’s” needs.

• Impatience: Naturally, a millennial is impatient. In the age of technology where everything is at the fingertips, millennial entrepreneurs find it difficult to do the one thing every entrepreneur must do: wait patiently. In any business you can’t expect immediate returns. It takes a considerable amount of time before you can reap the benefits. For a product to mature, you might have to wait several months or even years. Success just doesn’t happen overnight. Most, if not all, entrepreneurs often have to go through several failures before becoming successful.
• Following Lead: Since it has become relatively easy to start-up and operate a business through social media platforms, blogging, and other web-based methods, millennials tend to “follow lead” and call it entrepreneurship.

A successful entrepreneur friend or family may have made a big hit of their business venture. However, trying to imitate what someone else did to get your own stash of cash isn’t going to work. There is one major problem with this venture: competition. While a friend was starting up, there may have been less competition, a niche to cover, and networks to exploit. It doesn’t have to be the same for you. By “following lead” you are only giving your potential customers what they already have—from several other sources. With so much competition, chances are your target market is already full of choices and un-interested in anything that is already being offered.

Many thanks to Skornia Alison for this guest blog post. She is a career consultant and also works part-time with a UK firm that helps students with academic projects.