By Rachel Won / 29 April 2019 / Tags: Entrepreneur Journey

When I started off as entrepreneur, thinking that having design talent is good enough to bring me business. Unfortunately, in reality, things do not happen in this way. I learnt from the hard lessons so that I can be a better entrepreneur.

In business world, in very old school business terms, like 4 Ps of Marketing: Price, Product, Promotion, and Place. My business friends can definitely relate to. Even though times have changed, these 4 terms are very much used just that they have changed marketing terms, which is more related in digital space.
As I don’t have much knowledge about Business, I learnt along the way. I met many business friends and they shared with me their experiences and knowledge or even useful templates that I can track my own business KPI.

There are many business strategies I can apply in different situations. I am always wearing different hats when I meet my prospects. Sometimes, in a designer role, at times as an entrepreneur role, even as a sales person when closing the deals. In the office, I am a partner in collaboration team, as a leader and also a follower.

One of the painful lessons I had was I clinched my first $10k, I was very delighted in beginning. Due to our own inexperience in hiring people, my partner engaged 3 different inexperienced developers. The project was just to built an eCommerce website, which they couldn’t even build it properly.

I really let the 2 clients down. I have broken the trust they gave me. No amount of apology can make up for it. Even though we are still friends now. I constantly remind myself not to make such mistake twice.

“Once Trust is broken, it is hard to fix. Never lose or break Trust again.” – Rachel Won

The clients were kind and understanding people but they were very disappointed when we couldn’t even deliver proper website for them. I was disappointed as well. We lost a lot of time, efforts and money, left with unfunctional site. The cost of failing is heavy!

I remembered Ma Yun once said, “The first $10k is yours to keep but when people invested $100k or even more, they have given the trust and social responsibility to us and it is our full responsibility to make sure it happens.”

From this painful lesson, I learnt my lesson. Different developers have different skillsets, just like designers have our own design style and eye for aesthetic. I will make sure I have seen the developer real life work; the developer can do such scope of project before hiring them. It is my due diligent to make sure people I hire or work with has the right capability. This reduces my risk of failing the project.

Entrepreneurship can be challenging at times and fulfilling as well but as long as we have the vision, continue to be passionate in what we do and have a heart to serve others, we will go a long, long way.

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