On Thursday 7 November, The Canvas Riversands hosted an inspiring presentation and discussion ‘Hello 2020 Powering Up for the Year Ahead’ led by successful entrepreneur John Paul Waites.
Waites is a straight talker who’s been around the block and is the co-founder and CEO of Worx Group, a leading full-service event management and marketing company.
Starting up with a shoestring budget, he and his wife Kim Winstanley managed to get some funding capital from family but they bootstrapped this business from nothing and he remarked, “We got a few corporate events and just went hard.”
His experiences over the years make him the perfect choice for advising would-be entrepreneurs. He shared some key pieces of advice on what it takes to make it as an entrepreneur and how to market a business.
”An entrepreneur needs to realise things never happen on your schedule. You often focus on how you’re going to grow but you don’t sit back and think about the negative consequences. Journeys are often unmet and those who don’t know how to handle that will fail. As an entrepreneur, you live in two worlds – with failure on one side and success on the other – and you can’t have one without the other.”
John Paul Waites
Waites’ three key tips to becoming an entrepreneur.
His advice on how start-ups can market their brand effectively:
People tend to look at their ability to execute a job and not execute as an entrepreneur when taking the leap into entrepreneurship. You need to have a whole host of different skill sets, and skills like social media marketing are key.
My biggest social media tip? Be where your customers are: if they’re on LinkedIn – be on LinkedIn. A good example of this is: Kylie Jenner and her successful billion-dollar make-up business. She built her business on Snapchat and when everyone moved over to Instagram and Instagram Stories she switched over and quickly became one of the most vocal and best users of the platform for her purposes. She built her community quickly and was then able to monetise by selling the product that everyone wanted. Too often people are on every platform all the time, but it’s better to be at the right place at the right time.
But despite the hard work it takes to get there, you can become a successful entrepreneur – if you want it enough.
“This is one of the best and worst times ever to be an entrepreneur or marketer; you have access to global markets and social media is an amazing tool to help you launch your business. You just need to know how to use it properly.”
John Paul Waites
entrepreneur
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