Ask the Entrepreneurs:
Make Their 3 Worst Your 3 Best

[Note: Students in the Entrepreneurship program at Simon have submitted a number of questions and we encourage you to ask yours via the form on our Home/About page. We'll have one or more of our bloggers offer their takes — which should provide starting points for your thinking and more discussion.]

Question: Having successfully run a business for several years, what are one or two difficulties in starting a business that many budding entrepreneurs overlook or fail to consider?

One difficulty in starting a business that I believe entrepreneurs fail to truly consider is their “point of differentiation” and how to articulate it and market it. Many entrepreneurs jump in headfirst trying to do a million things without the clarity and focus that you need.

For example, one thing that helped me “create” my points of differentiation was that I did a mini focus group with clients. I interviewed 10 CEO’s from small-sized companies, 10 CEO’s from medium-sized companies and 10 CEO’s from large-sized companies.

I asked them for six items: What are the top 3 things you love and can’t live without from your current advertising agency relationship and what are the top 3 things that just make you crazy?

Whew … the CEO’s were hard pressed to tell me the things they loved!

But they were quick to respond to the 3 things that got under their skin. And, the most interesting thing was that those things were all the same … didn’t matter about the size of the company.

Those 3 things became our points of differentiation and 20 years later remain!