Welcome back! Hopefully you enjoyed reading the first six entrepreneurs share the best advice they’ve ever received in our previous post on Monday, published by Business Insider. Here is even more advice from six more successful entrepreneurs.
Camping World CEO Marcus Lemonis: Get into a business where you can be a big fish.
"The best advice I ever got was from Lee Iaccoca, who was very influential in my career," Lemonis told Business Insider. "It was very simple. It was get into a business where you can be a big fish, not the little fish. Get into a business where you can be a change agent, where you can make a difference. It's worked well for me."
5 Acre Farms CEO Dan Horan: Simplicity is everything.
"Simplicity is really important," Horan told Business Insider. "It's got to be simple, and sometimes to make something simple you have to really, really study everything about it. It might turn out to be complex, but you have to present it simply, particularly when it comes to people: when people buy something, they don't want a lecture."
Hello Design CEO David Lai: Your time is a precious commodity.
"When I was growing up my father would always tell me, 'We all only have 24 hours a day. It's what we choose to do with that time that defines us,'" Lai told Business Insider. "It's the one thing you can never get back."
Real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran: My best advice was an insult.
Call it reverse psychology, but it was an insult that motivated Corcoran to succeed. "It's kind of weird. The best advice was the worst advice," she told Business Insider's Henry Blodget. "It was from my boyfriend and partner in my first business when he told me I would never succeed without him. I was injured no doubt. But thank God he insulted me because I would not have built a big business without that. It kept me trying everything because I couldn't give him the satisfaction of seeing me fail. So the best advice was an insult."
NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam: If you're not being told 'no' constantly, you're not pushing hard enough.
"Multiple people have told me this, and I don't know if I can credit it to a single person, but one thing that I think about is if you're not getting told 'no' enough times a day, you're probably not doing it right or you're probably not pushing yourself hard enough," Islam told Business Insider.
"I think that's a good piece of advice for anybody building a company because you hear 'no' so many times," Islam adds. "And I think that's normal, that's a good thing, that you're trying to trying to do something that's disruptive, that's groundbreaking, that there's going to be naysayers."
SumAll CEO Dane Atkinson: Learn to say 'no' and focus on what you do best.
"One thing that I've slowly come to realize is that focus is so critically important," Atkinson told Business Insider. "Saying 'no' to great ideas is necessary to get to the brilliant ones. At every step of the way you have to cut towards one path. It's such a hard thing to do as an entrepreneur because you don't really have the confidence in where you're going yourself."
"You see these little companies building out service brands because they want to have account executives who work with customers," Atkinson adds, "so they try to spin their products into serving three different groups in the first couple of years, and that's a very adverse situation to get into. We all expect services to do one thing right, allow you to search the world or enter 140 characters or post pictures of your friends. It's a very simple formula that you just repeat and rinse all the way to success."
Have a thought to share, or advice to add? Let us know in the comments below!
