Startup leaders NEED to understand and master the specific skills required to align and keep aligned each of the Five Ducks. This article goes into detail on the best methods for doing the initial alignment and then for monitoring alignment and for re-aligning as might be required by unforeseen circumstances.

We want to share with you a collection of different snippets of insights we have gained from over 70+ combined years of practicing, studying and teaching entrepreneuring. We want to deliver to you useful insights in the most efficient way possible, which means we say what needs to be said and nothing more. We call these snippets sessions, and each one can be digested in minutes.

Understanding the basics of motivations will help you understand how to get other people to help you succeed. Motivations are what get people to act and actually do something. Hunger motivates you to find food. Offering food is a classic way to motivate somebody to sit down and be friendly for a while; once they are finished, another motivation will take over how they act and they will likely leave.

Your capabilities are defined by your specific motivations, traits and skills. Understanding the inventory of your own motivations, traits and skills helps you understand how you behave and make decisions even under the extreme pressures you will encounter as an entrepreneur. Understanding motivations, traits, and skills also enables you to better help teammates be and others successful in their decision making by understanding on their motivations, traits and skills. With this specific set of knowledge you can understand how to act and share decision making in more complimentary and less stressful ways (our session 8 on Relationship Building will expand on this).

You need to understand the value your service or product will deliver to user(s), which is not just money related. To probe for value you must be able to tell a story about your product or service that enables your interviewee to picture themselves using and enjoying it. If you have drawings or images that can help someone relate to your story that’s even better. The story should be about them, “Imagine yourself walking in this mall [sitting on this beach] …” So try to conduct your interviews near where the product or service will be used.

The answer to this big question of “how many customers” starts by figuring out the answer to several subsidiary questions. The first question is … How will potential customers even find you? You might have a great product or service but unless potential customers can find out about you then they will never be your customer. There are many ways they can find you. You can rent a store in a mall with lots of foot traffic, you can advertise, you can rent a booth at a convention where your customers congregate, you can hold special events, you can pay celebrities to mention you, you can pass out flyers, …

Situating yourself amidst strangers interested in your idea

Where do people think about or do the thing you want to help them do better? This is where you want to hang out. This could be a food court where everyone is on apps or a computer killing time and therefore interested in finding more interesting things to do. Or it could be a trade show where most people share an interest in certain products. On-line special interest groups work for testing digitally delivered services but you must be careful because you can’t know true identities and potential competitors could be lurking as they search for new ideas.

A persona is a detailed description of a type of customer you may want to serve. Instead of treating “all customers” as the same, you can improve profits and customer satisfaction by realizing that specific types of people or businesses have their own different needs, problems, and goals. Think of each persona as a character in a story. Think of their background, what they care about, what frustrates them, and what they’re looking for. This will help design your product, remove unimportant features, and target sales messaging that speaks directly to personas.

All successful entrepreneurs, throughout time have done one thing: Successful entrepreneurs make some group of people so happy that they are gladly given money in return.

This principle points to how the goal of entrepreneurship is always about creating positive emotions for others, not creating profit, product or technology. Entrepreneurial success also always requires focusing on a specific group of people that are not as happy as they want to be or dream to be. Entrepreneurship requires you understand specific people, or work with somebody who understand them.

Culture has a direct impact on your productivity and the productivity of everyone that works for you and with you, for better or worse. Many founders are not aware of the importance of culture and therefore let culture develop randomly and inconsistently, resulting in lost profits and higher chances of failure. Savvy founders craft a culture that focuses everyone’s efforts on delivering what the founder feels will be the business’ competitive advantage.

Co-founders split when working together becomes intolerable. We have already discussed how co-founders can flourish. Unfortunately, that often does not happen. On the overview page to Session 12 we mentioned the statistic that only 1 in 4 founding teams stay together for more than four years. We can also add that co-founders splitting in the first four years is the biggest cause of startup failure.

This blog leads through steps to create a powerful PLS. We assume you have already read and digested the previous blog titled “Entrepreneurial Self-Awareness.” Working through the steps outlined in that blog yielded a list of strengths and weaknesses specific to achieving your entrepreneurial ambitions. We need these results and analyses as input for this exercise.