Entrepreneurs experience long days, sleepless nights — and a lot of opinions about how to bring their business idea to fruition. I’ve spent my career working with and for startups, and I know how difficult it can be to parse through a ton of information and find the path that makes the most sense.
That’s why I don’t walk into the room with answers. As a leader in the 1501 Health startup incubator program, I know it’s important to start by building personal relationships: getting to know each founder and figuring out how I can put on the "right hat" to best support them.
Entrepreneurs need different types of support at different times. It’s my job to navigate and provide what they need to be successful.
There are, however, some attitudes and behaviors I think are centrally important to cultivate in an environment that supports successful entrepreneurs.
Total openness with a side of self-trust
Empathic listening is key to building constructive, collaborative relationships, the foundation of every successful business. The biggest stumbling block I’ve seen for entrepreneurs is getting stuck on the idea of what they think they are building, versus what their customers or advisors need.
Being willing to truly listen is so important, even if an entrepreneur doesn’t agree with all of the feedback they’re receiving. Absorb every idea and insight in the conversation. Then, trust your gut. Or, have your inner circle support you as you parse through those ideas, deciding which to toss and which to explore further.
Courageous creativity
Encouraging entrepreneurs to be creative isn’t hard. Encouraging entrepreneurs to believe in their creativity is more difficult, especially at a stage when they are gathering and processing feedback. It may sound like contradictory advice: stay open to feedback but trust yourself. A willingness to grow coupled with a strong vision, however, makes setting a path less daunting.
One example of this in action is when a member of our first cohort of 1501 Health came in facing a significant challenge related to scalability. Everybody had a different opinion. After connecting the company’s leaders with a cabinet of advisors who could guide them through the specific health care hurdles they were facing, they were able to look within, better understand the issues, and confidently create a major business model transformation to not only add additional value to the customers they were already serving but begin to scale their health care product nationally.
Fail fast, fail together
I have found that the greatest way to empower creativity is by creating a safe space to fail. I had a mentor who told me: “I would rather you make 100 decisions and get 20 of them wrong, then make 10 decisions and have them all be right. Because ultimately you've only made 10 good decisions instead of 80 good decisions.”
I tell entrepreneurs: I'm not going to be measuring you on your failure rate, I'm going to be measuring you on how much you get done, and how effectively you are engaging the resources available to you to do it. To me, there’s no creativity without vulnerability to failure. Otherwise, there are too many ideas that will never grow to fruition. A well-designed incubator program gives you explicit permission to take risks and to fail.
Failure is the part of the corporate origin story that’s too often swept under the rug.
The entrepreneurs I’ve seen who have experienced the most success are the ones who trusted themselves to listen, grow, fail — and repeat as needed. That, to me, is as complete a recipe as I’ve seen in the startup world. Just add hard work and caffeine.
Emily Durfee is co-manager of 1501 Health, a national healthcare incubator program.
