The Entrepreneurs with Ben Lehnert & Derek Lidow

Almost all entrepreneurs either over plan or do not plan at all.In this sprint, Derek and Ben describe specifically what level of planning and anticipation of the future makes most sense for an entrepreneur once they feel their idea has potential.As the entrepreneur now wants to invest some time and money in working out how to turn the idea into an actual product or service a customer is gladly willing to pay for, they need to make sure the needed money, time and people will be there when needed.

Founding a company and leading it from being just an idea to actually serving customers and prospering for many years is extremely challenging.In this episode, Ben and Derek will help you reflect on the learnings and coachings from Sprints 7-16. Doing so, will help you set your personal priorities, which can be difficult under the pressure of a startup.You will learn to create a Personal Leadership Strategy (PLS) which enables you to formulate an objective list of strengths and weaknesses relative to your entrepreneurial ambitions, and, even more importantly, develop and implement strategies to leverage your strengths and mitigate your weaknesses, further improving your chances of entrepreneurial success. This also helps keeping a balance with friends and family.

In this episode, Ben and Derek cover one of the leading causes for startups and businesses to fail. In the US, over half of all startups have more than one founder. On a global basis, over 75% of all startups involve a family member. Once a startup finds traction for their product, co-founder conflict is the biggest cause of failure.Only 1 in 4 founding teams stay together for more than four years. Co-founder relationship building skills we discussed in sprints 8, 9 and 10 are essential for maximizing a startup’s chances for survival, let alone success.When family members, friends and love interests are involved, these skills are even more important.We describe how do use these skills to carefully structure and document the shared objectives and payoffs you agree to pursue before working together on a startup.Find this and all our free sprints here: https://www.theentrepreneurs.io/sprint-library

Keeping with the metaphor we used in sprint 14 of waking up and finding yourself at the control of an airplane, in this sprint we describe how to pilot the takeoff, climb, cruise and landing of your enterprise.The takeoff, climb, cruise and landing correspond to 4 very specific stages of enterprise maturity. In the previous sprint you learned about the 3 essential flight controls: projects, processes and culture.Without understanding how these controls work and how to pilot your enterprise through the 4 stages, expect poor performance and then failure.Interested in learning more? Find this and all our other FREE sprints at https://www.theentrepreneurs.io/sprint-library

Leading a startup can generate the same feelings as you might have in a nightmare where you found yourself having to take the controls of a jumbo jet running out of fuel.You have only the vaguest ideas of what a few of the controls do, how the plane reacts and what it takes to find a place to land, let alone land it.In this sprint, Ben and Derek describe the essential basics of how a startup creates value and how to stabilize it, despite the turbulence of competition and the real world. Not understanding these basics results in poor performance and failure.This is the first of 2 sprints that help you fly your startup and here we focus on the three controls on how you create value: projects, processes and company culture.Find this and more sprints in our free sprint library: https://www.theentrepreneurs.io/sprint-library

Startup leaders NEED to understand and master the specific skills required to align and keep aligned each of the Five Ducks.In this sprint, Ben and Derek go into detail on the best methods for doing the initial alignment and then for monitoring alignment and for re-aligning as might be required by unforeseen circumstances.Check out this and all other free sprints at https://www.theentrepreneurs.io/sprint-library

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io/sprint-libraryIf you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership.People feel uncomfortable with change and resist it, yet startups must constantly change to improve customer and user experiences, respond to changing economic and competitive conditions, and to accommodate and assimilate new technologies and techniques.In this episode, Ben and Derek explain the importance for startup leaders to understand and master the skills required to get all stakeholders comfortable and supportive of constant change.

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io/sprint-libraryIf you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership.Building powerful relationships with the people on your team is essential to work effectively, but you need a different set of skills to get strangers or groups of people whom you don’t know personally to help you achieve your vision.In this sprint, Ben and Derek give you an understanding of skill set involved with motivating others to dedicate themselves to helping you successfully achieve your vision.

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.ioIf you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership.Shared objectives are at the core of all relationships. It is important that you can identify and dissect any relationship into its separate shared objectives.To illustrate this we will go into detail about the various shared objectives Derek had with his COO at iSuppli.We will go into more depth with plenty of examples to help you get more comfortable about identifying shared objectives. It also important that you realize how powerful relationships are composed of combinations of cooperating, competing and retreating shared objectives.

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.ioIf you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership.The most basic of all relationships is: communicating. You communicate with many people, whether you like it or realize it.In this sprint, Derek and Ben coach you to understand the cooperating, competing and retreating types of communications, how to tell them apart and how you use the right one in any situation required to lead your startup.Most communication is done poorly, so it is easy to just assume that communicating is too hard to master or that it requires charisma. This is bunk and we will explain why and help you be respected as someone people trust to communicate the things they need to know and understand.

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.ioIf you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership.This sprint coaches you on how to master skills required to build strong relationships with almost anyone and help others make their relationships more productive.We want to help you understand how to work effectively with almost anyone. You will need to work with many types of individuals to make your enterprise a success, including strangers. You will also need the people you work with to work productively together.These are broadly useful and powerful skills that revolve around understanding the role of shared objectives in forming relationships and the three types of shared objectives, cooperating, competing and retreating that you can use to mold together to create more powerful relationships with almost anyone.

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.ioIf you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership.Starting your own business is stressful. But making good decisions in high-pressure moments doesn’t have to freak you out. In this episode, Ben and Derek walk you through how to stay level-headed and make better decisions.Accurately understanding your own capabilities is an essential starting point, specifically understanding your motivations, traits and skills.Knowing where, when and how to be confident in your decision-making is critical to not screwing up, withstanding brutal startup pressures, and ultimately making better decisions because of your teamwork and leadership.

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.ioIf you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership.In this episode, Ben and Derek explain the last missing piece in the “capturing happy customer” puzzle is figuring how much they would be willing to pay. You can ask a potential customer, but their answer may not be a good choice for you.You want to set a price that gives you a fair profit by capturing its full value—whether tangible (like savings) or intangible (like a super fun experience). You need to set a price that takes into account other alternatives a potential customer in achieving a similar state of happiness.Naive pricing can set prices too low and destroy your ability to be profitable or too high and turn away potential customers, threatening your ability to stay in business.

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.ioIf you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership.In this episode, Ben and Derek coach you how to think through how many customers you can reasonably expect to capture (while the next sprint leads you through how much they might pay).To figure out how many customers you might get, we take you through several steps. You will need to reason through how potential customers will find you and decide they love what you are doing so much they want to be your customer (and not a competitor’s).Many great ideas fail because founders forget that they need to go out and thoughtfully solicit customers. This is a critical risk reduction exercise.

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.ioIf you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership.In this episode, Ben and Derek walk you through how to figure out exactly which group of potential customers most wants what you will offer. We explain how you find the persona that will be easiest and most profitable to make super happy.Your competitive advantage comes from how much better you know a customer group than your competitor, so this is important!This sprint enables you to segment potential customers into groups, called personas, which in turn helps you more precisely target your sales and marketing efforts.

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.ioIf you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership.In this episode, Ben and Derek explain how to properly test your idea with potential customers. Until you confirm your idea for making groups of strangers very happy works, it doesn’t make sense to invest the time and money to implement it. And no idea is perfect out of the box.This is a very demanding session, but the benefits in risk reduction are immense. We first walk you through our extensive material on: Testing ideas with strangers.We then challenge you to plan, then execute and then think about and analyze the ton of information you will gain from asking open-ended questions to strangers.Come back to this sprint and its exercises as many times as you need until you feel confident in your idea.

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.ioIf you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership.In this episode, Ben and Derek walk you through how to find good ideas for your startup, buy understanding how to tell and eliminate bad ones.First, you will learn about The Fundamental Principle of Entrepreneurship which underlies every successful business idea. This principle applies to for-profit and non-profit ideas and ventures.In the sprint exercise, we teach you how to do an assessment of your ideas and how to prove an idea’s potential for success.

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.ioFor more support, accountability and support join our membership.In this first sprint episode we explore the importance of understanding one's own deep motivation for wanting to be an entrepreneur and the correlation with success.We emphasize the significance of preparation and learning in the entrepreneurial journey, as well as the reflection on good and bad motivations for entrepreneurship.Understanding one's ultimate selfish desire is highlighted as a key aspect of motivation. The sprint exercise helps you uncover your own personal motivation to be a founder and start a business.TakeawaysUnderstanding your true motivation for being an entrepreneur is highly correlated with your chances of being successful.The key to determining if your primary motivation to be successful is strong enough is whether you have a strong desire to prepare.Use the sprint exercise to reflect and uncover your own motivationsChapters00:00 The Motivation to Be an Entrepreneur05:02 Reflecting on Your Motivations10:27 The Importance of Preparation and Learning

Explore our expanding library of free sprints on www.theentrepreneurs.ioFor more support, accountability and support join our membership.Welcome to The Entrepreneurs! This first episode introduces our brand-new platform and the concept of sprints to deliver critical entrepreneurial insights, tested and proven tools, and self-guided exercises to help you succeed on your startup journey.All sprints are based on Derek’s extensive, world-leading research, his 3 books and the various classes we’ve created and taught at Princeton. With jointly more than 1000 students and 100s of entrepreneurs we’ve mentored, we’re excited to offer the same guidance now to founders of all kinds, anywhere in the world.Lastly, we share with your a glimpse into our future build-out plans as well as our membership plan that offers premium support for those who want more, such as 1:1 video coaching with Ben and Derek, private community chat, and members-only events and webinars to answer your burning founder questions.Our mission is to help you be successful entrepreneurs. So, please share with us any and all feedback on how we can make the platform better for you.