Each new year brings new opportunities to build and grow your business, along with new challenges capable of redefining how that’s done. Rami Alame is an acclaimed author and serial entrepreneur. His latest book, “Startup Kudos”, lays out his essential business tips and solutions through a series of engaging, colorful examples from the real world. Alame is also a founder of Lexyom, the first digital legal platform of its kind in the Middle East, which brings the assistance of experienced lawyers to clients through a simple, easy to use online interface. Here are Alame’s 6 New Years tips for entrepreneurs seeking to better their business practices in 2022.
Orient your approach around solving a specific problem
Problems present opportunities. Finding a specific issue or gap in a market, and orienting a startup around providing the best possible solution to that problem should function as the foundation for any entrepreneur’s initial business model. The world of entrepreneurship presents challenges and obstacles that can easily obscure the best path forward. By centering efforts around a primarily problem-solution based framework, founders can maintain the direction they need to expand and improve operations.
Grapple with new trends, don’t run from them.
Staying on top of new trends that affect your business will always play a critical role in keeping it competitive. Entrepreneurs should keep their eyes on the future and anticipate how developing trends could shape it, long past the New Year. Intelligently predicting how the emergent trends of today will define the business ecosystem of tomorrow and planning accordingly could prove the difference between early success and failure. Reading voraciously, observing competition, networking both within and outside the industry, and studying the numbers can all help entrepreneurs better understand how the world around them is changing and what they must do to stay ahead of the curve.
The next 10 years are all about decentralization & smart contracts.
Blockchain continues to redefine the world around us, leaving virtually no industry unaffected by its rapid proliferation. Understanding the opportunities that lie behind the emergent use of smart contracts, and decentralization, generally, will prove invaluable to entrepreneurs in years to come.
Smart contracts serve the same purpose as traditional contracts, namely, they provide a legally binding agreement when two parties seek to establish terms and mutual obligations. What makes smart contracts unique, however, is their utilization of blockchain, which automates agreement execution in a decentralized, transparent manner, forgoing the involvement of third parties. From medicine to retail, this new form of contract is reshaping how business is done, offering unforeseen opportunities to improve logistics, efficiency, and, if you’re wise, strategy.
Oh, and let’s not forget augmented and virtual reality.
The COVID-19 pandemic opened the floodgates for an unprecedented demand for virtual connection. Museums launched virtual experience initiatives, retailers experimented with virtual shopping platforms, and medical professionals harnessed the power of augmented and virtual reality to train colleagues thousands of miles away and assist in life saving operations that would have never been possible before.
Although entrepreneurs cannot know for certain the specific ways in which augmented and virtual reality will continue to play into the future of their industries, remaining open to the possibilities they promise and informed about developments in their utilization will only serve to bolster the strength of their businesses’ long term prospects.
Community building is as important as ever.
Through community building, businesses demonstrate their commitment to establishing meaningful relationships with the communities they intend to serve. In addition to the valuable feedback entrepreneurs derive from interacting with their audiences, community building presents a powerful means to improve loyalty, trust, and ultimately, rate of return.
As social media usage patterns and digital balkanization continue to spur the formation of insular online communities, engaging with them becomes increasingly more important and more valuable for ensuring the success of startups.
Surround yourself with a quality team as soon as possible.
Teamwork breeds innovation. This is as true today as it has been for decades. With committed minds working alongside one another, it becomes significantly easier to brainstorm, develop innovative solutions to new problems, as well as locate and address holes in a current plan, strategy, or idea. Beyond this, of course, a team of multiple contributors brings with it a diversified skill set, something essential to rolling out quality products and services, as well as a diversified set of connections and knowledge.
A team can be as weak or as strong as its component parts, so choose the line-up accordingly and invest in the things that bolster effective cooperation. #OneLife
To learn more about Rami Alame, or to order a copy of “Startup Kudos” today, visit: https://ramialame.com/
