Dear Wantrepreneurs
This article is written by Mohammad Eslim, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.
Dr. Erhan Erkut received a BSc in Industrial Engineering from Bogazici University in 1980 and a Ph.D. University of Alberta School of Business during 1985-2005. He is a member of the Canadian Operational Research Society. Dr. Erkut has established a Center for Excellence in Management and Management.
There are a few pieces of advice that prof. Erhan Erkut summed them in five points for those who had chosen the way of entrepreneurship into building your own company and making your own place in the market then scaling your business from the local markets or the regional markets into the global markets.
He made it clear how it is important for them to read entrepreneurship book, he even made suggestions on what books are the best to learn about what entrepreneurship is about and what you are going to face as an entrepreneurs when you start your startup.
The first book he made suggestions for was ‘Delivering Happiness’ for Tony Hsieh, the founder and CEO of Zappos Inc., it is a wonderful autographical story about the life of an entrepreneur. Then you have the book ‘The Startup in You’ by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha and it’s actually a career planning book that comes in quite handy for future entrepreneurs. The third suggestion was for ‘The Art of the Start’ by Guy Kawasaki followed by ‘Disciplined Entrepreneurship’, a book which is currently translated into Turkish, for his author Bill Aulet. You can add to all those ‘The Startup Owner’s Manual’ for Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, this book has been translated into Turkish whereas it has been noted that unfortunately there is a dearth of entrepreneurship books in Turkish on account of English is not as widely spoken in Turkey as we would like to be. Moreover, there are not enough success stories or role models for Turkish youth who is considering to be entrepreneurs.
After reading books comes the real thing so start following several startups closely, this way you would pick up what you should do and how to get going tips and notes when it comes to your turn in a startup. Then comes the acting phase which really means you should go out there to a startup and offer free labor, menial help because now you are to learn by doing.
Tip No.4 is to go ahead and work for a company for five years, it is ok to do so in the light of gaining experience and learning the gest of things and what is popular in the market, what the trends are and where the demand is heading to. Collecting Data is a skill you would learn during those five years as an employee in a company, also is decision-making due to the position you will hold when you determine how to deal with this data and what the next step to take given this collection of data.
After that you can start your own company build on your own experience and knowledge about the entrepreneurship lifecycle. Isn’t it easy, folks?
https://vimeo.com/141519448