Tamakkan’s seminar, “The Path to Successful Entrepreneurship” focused on the challenges and opportunities facing startups. Successful entrepreneurs offered helpful insights and advice as The Tamakkan Team asked speakers their top three business tips for SMEs.
Esraa Bani-Rothman, Founder and CEO of Mom’s Guide Abu Dhabi:
1. Don’t suffer from the paralysis-analysis syndrome which are people who take a long time analyzing the market and they’re not actually doing. So unplan and start doing!
2. Follow your heart. Find your calling and find what is it that thing that makes you do what you’re doing.
3. Have your own network and platform. Don’t be so needy of others to echo and advertise for you. If you have a really strong community, social media presence, and website, you will be self-sufficient!
Mohamed Amine Belarbi, Serial Entrepreneur, Blogger and Public Speaker:
1. Fail early, fail often. Failing is the best way to know where you are to improve your business model and/or your products.
2. Don’t aim for perfection. Done is better than perfect – a lot of people try to wait until they have the perfect product or the perfect business before they launch when in fact the best strategy to go about this is to launch the most simplified viable product and then perfection is what happens afterwards.
3. Believe in yourself. Just get out there, believe that you can – if someone did it, then you can do it. Just as long as you push hard and work hard, then you can make it.
Sumayyah Al Suwaidi, Owner of Grafika Boutique and Founder of Abu Dhabi Fashion Days
1. If you are skilled and if you excel in something that everybody is looking for, then go for it.
2. It doesn’t matter if you have the budget or not, you can even start the business online.
3. Nowadays, you can have anything online – people who talk about it and it will be known for sure if it’s really amazing.
Dr. Connie Van Horne, Assistant Professor of Strategy, Zayed University and Dr. Victor Huang, Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship, Zayed University
1. Look for opportunities that are unfilled. Looking for needs in the community and answering the question: “How would you fill it?” And on business models – consider and analyze your business model and have a clear logic about your value-creation process.
2. There’s a huge fear of failure, fear of losing face in the community but if you start small, you could overcome that fear.
3. There’s a high discontinuation rate and very low established businesses. One possible solution is for people to team up. Check each other’s complementary skills between expats and nationals. One other thing that plays a central role is policy in terms of cultivating the entrepreneur culture in the society. Things like Tamakkan help out since they make people interested in entrepreneurship and hear inspiring stories. It’s the inspiration that puts that spark to turn that opportunity into a venture.
Note: This article is a repost
