What You Should Be Working On Right Now, Part I

This post is the first part of a series on the most important thing you—the entrepreneur, or soon to be one—should be working on.

You’ve heard that you’re supposed to work “on your business, not in it,” but you have no idea what that means or where to start. You have a lot of work to do—development, market analytics, sales, employee issues, getting or managing investors. The list is endless and all of it seems to come at you at the same time. So every morning you attack the project that appears to be the most urgent, and by the end of the day you wonder where your time went.

Welcome to the life of the typical entrepreneur. But you can free yourself from the tyranny of the urgent with a single concept:

Start every day with a plan to create value in your company that day.

So how do you create value in your company? Well you know how to create value for your product: You make that product into the best thing anyone would want to buy at a price that will earn you a profit. You constantly work to make it cheaper, better quality, better recognized and distinguished from competitors, more attractive and engaging. You make your product into something that buyers are proud to have purchased.

And you create value in your company by thinking of it as a product that someone would want to buy, by turning your company into one that a buyer would be proud to have purchased.

What are buyers of a company looking for? It should be easy to operate, be well known for its products, be able to fend off competitors, and have growth potential.

Hey, those are things you would like to have in your own company! So get to work making your company into that…every day. Here’s how:

Turn every good idea within your company into intellectual property

Intellectual property is a legal concept with specific attributes. Intellectual property comes in four flavors: Trade Secrets, Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents. You can use every one of these types of intellectual property to turn your company into one that a buyer—and you— would be proud to own.

In the next post in this series I will tell you exactly how to use the most important form of intellectual property, trade secrets, to create value in your company.