Business Advice From Three Global Entrepreneurs

By Christopher Ebuka

24 March 2018 | 5:00 am

Motivation is something you can never get enough of. It helps you take that leap or work harder or hold on a little longer. Starting and running a business can be difficult, that is why this list has been made to help you. Every situation you might be in, someone else is already there. Here…

Every situation you might be in, someone else is already there. Here are business tips from Branson, Cuban and Huffington.

Richard Branson
Branson is an English business magnate, investor and philanthropist. He founded the Virgin Group, which controls more than 400 companies.

Branson expressed his desire to become an entrepreneur at a young age. His first business venture, at the age of 16, was a magazine called Student. In 1970, he set up a mail-order record business. He opened a chain of record stores, Virgin Records—later known as Virgin Megastores—in 1972. Branson’s Virgin brand grew rapidly during the 1980s, as he set up Virgin Atlantic airline and expanded the Virgin Records music label.

Here is his advice:

“The best businesses come from people’s bad personal experiences. If you just keep your eyes open, you’re going to find something that frustrates you, and then you think, ‘well I could maybe do it better than it’s being done,’ and there you have a business. If you can improve people’s lives, you have a business. People think, ‘well everything’s been thought of,’ but actually, all of the time, there are gaps in the market here and gaps in the market there.”

Richard Branson. Photo credit: Mindset

Mark Cuban
Cuban is an American businessman and investor. He is the owner of the National Basketball Association (NBA)‘s Dallas Mavericks, co-owner of 2929 Entertainment and chairman of AXS TV. He is also one of the main “shark” investors on the ABC reality television series, Shark Tank. In 2011, Cuban wrote an e-book, How to Win at the Sport of Business, in which he chronicles his experiences in business and sports.

Here is his advice:

“What I always ask people is, is it something you love to do and is this something you’re good at? Then, taking that first step is always the hardest. It’s terrifying, but really, it’s about preparation. We all go through this process where you’ve got the business idea, you get that feeling in your stomach and you get all excited. Then you talk to a friend, and your friend says, ‘oh wow that’s pretty cool, I’ve never heard of anything like that. I’d buy that.’ And then you do the Google search. The first thing I’ll tell you is that just because you don’t see it on Google, doesn’t mean one hundred companies haven’t gone out of business doing the same thing. It hasn’t been done for a reason, because every company that’s tried it, has gone out of business.”

Mark Cuban. Photo credit: CNBC

Arianna Huffington
Huffington is a Greek-American author, syndicated columnist, and businesswoman. She was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, which is now owned by AOL. She was a popular conservative commentator in the mid-1990s, after which, in the late-1990s, she offered liberal points of view in public, while remaining involved in business endeavours. In 2003, she ran as an independent candidate for governor in the California recall election and lost. In 2009, Huffington was number 12 in Forbes‘s first-ever list of the Most Influential Women In Media.

This is her advice:

“If you’re going to start a business, you need to really love it, because not everybody is going to love it. When The Huffington Post was first launched in 2005, there were so many detractors. I remember a critic who wrote that The Huffington Post was an unsurvivable failure. When you get reviews like that and detractors like that, you have to really believe in your product. When you really believe in your product, you are willing to deal with all the naysayers and persevere.”