Business Alchemist

To me being entrepreneurial, the foremost quality is to be resourceful. Then comes the risk-taking nature and innovative mindset, in this order, respectively. You might think that the first and foremost quality of an entrepreneur is to be innovative. Many people are innovative, in fact, I read somewhere that creative and innovative people are usually the lazy ones, because they are able to think of a faster, perhaps better and easier way to get a job done. Hence the creativity. But the question is how many of these ideas are put into execution.      Now if you act on your innovative idea you are already a one in a million to do that (*give yourself a pat on the back). But still, it does not mean you are entrepreneurial. The bigger the idea the bigger the risk, the bigger the risk, the more the resources you need to acquire and manage. Accepting the fact that resources are scarce and knowing how to acquire them, or able to just make-do with passable resources to stil...

In a traditional sense, most businesses started small; small manpower, small capital, small office, small revenue, small profit... And the disadvantage of being a small business is you get crushed by big boys easily. In fact, many a time small businesses lose out from competing with big companies. This scenario justifies the underdog status for a small startup.  But lately some small startups are starting big, in terms of funding. They start with a considerable amount of funding, a number of sharing-economy startups such as Airbnb, Mobike, Uber raised millions and millions of dollars through the years, for example. Many would think that the underdog description does not apply to these startups because they are funded with big capital. The truth is, entrepreneurship is 'underdog-hood' whether you start with big capital or not. The essence of entrepreneurship is creating value by solving your target audience's problems. Sometimes your solution is competing agains...