Partner Article

Making your mark as an entrepreneur

It’s Entrepreneurship Week on Bdaily. Derek Bradley, CEO of Panacea Adviser, explains how you can make your mark as an entrepreneur.

Part of the challenge of being an entrepreneur, if you’re going for a really huge opportunity, is finding the problems that aren’t quite on the radar yet and trying to solve them.

As a business, we are a big beneficiary of the regulatory change in financial services distribution – as we saw the radar blip in 2006. However, as is often the way, we initially thought that blip was something else. It was only when it got closer that we realised that our plan to engage with this ‘blip’ had, in fact, been the right one.

I try not to dwell on lost opportunity and I often make mistakes – that’s part of the risk profile of being an entrepreneur (if I am considered as one).

I guess my big regret is that I did not start Panacea Adviser sooner. Having said that, I do take solace in the fact that what Panacea Adviser does and how we do it, is very much in the ‘now’ – technology did not exist to do what we do any sooner.

Here are 10 tips that may help those looking to make their mark in the entrepreneur space:

• If you live for weekends off and holidays, running a business is not for you
• The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary
• Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work
• Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life in a way that most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life in a way that most people cannot
• It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission
• The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake – you can’t learn anything from being perfect
• Fall seven times, stand up eight
• If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough
• One day your life will flash before your eyes – make sure it is worth watching
• Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment

And one from Sarah Paul, our Marketing Director, who lives by this – “Do something different every day….if you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you always got”.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Panacea Adviser .