A good idea isn’t enough.
When I was a boy and went to university, (to be honest, I did not attend very much at all) instead of studying, I decided to open my first startup when the internet was still just an idea and downloading one image took as long as preparing a cup of tea.
It began with online real estate ads in my city, Milan in Italy. At the time, people looked for homes by looking at the signs hanging outside the doors of buildings or in advertising newspapers. It seemed like a science fiction idea to me.
As you can imagine, since I’m clearly not on the Forbes’ Annual World Billionaire’ List, it wasn’t a hit. In fact, it went pretty badly. The idea was good, but I was too young and inexperienced, perhaps too optimistic, and above all, I had a truly ridiculous budget. I made a couple of mistakes and that made me run out of all my capital in a short time. Plus, I had some debt to pay for a couple of years. End of that story.
Over the years I have made a career in other sectors and at 40-years-old, I decided it was time to finish the university I had left, above all to make my mother happy. And so it was.
During my experience, I learned that it is important to be ready when we have an idea in which we create and that there is no margin for error and the risk of losing everything is always very high.
But do schools and universities really teach us to be good entrepreneurs and managers? I’m not so sure.
It doesn’t matter how many Master’s degrees you have, how many books you will read, how many YouTube tutorials you will watch, or how many personal success Instagram groups you will follow. What you cannot know is you. You can’t be sure of how you will react to difficult choices or failure.
A passage from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War says, “In battle, the ability to win depends on us, the ability to win depends on the enemy.”
The same is true in the market and in business. We may have the best product in the world in an uncompetitive market yet fail because we don’t know ourselves enough.
An entrepreneur plays an important role in society. He has the responsibility of the families of the workers. We can compare him to a pilot of an airplane who (I hope) does not experience flights full of passengers but rather practices for hours on a simulator.
So why not use a simulator for entrepreneurs too?
This is where my Bacu.me (Business ACUMEn) project was born, a business simulator that gives the user the experience of a startup from its establishment to its launch on the market.
In the simulator you learn about not only how a company works but above all, to better know yourself as a leader.
The project required 2,000 hours of development that involved professionals and university teachers to provide a useful tool for individuals and also for companies, to be able to evaluate the talent of executives more objectively.
The simulator was designed to give an overview of the company and not a tool for making money.
We have also given great importance to the role that the company plays in society. For this reason, we have included environmental sustainability and employee satisfaction among the objectives. We highlighted how break times and proper vacation management are essential for the work-life balance of the company and employees. We also reiterated the importance of gender equality. During the hiring process, whether it is an employee or a worker, there is no wage or productivity difference in the simulator. A gender imbalance is considered a factor of a company’s weakness.
Now I have a 6-year-old daughter and I have stopped thinking about the Forbes ranking. I just need to be number 1 for her.
Bacu.me is a project aimed at new generations in the hope that they can do better than the previous ones.
In our world, girls have less access to higher education and this greatly limits their possibilities. Bacu.me will always be free for associations or organizations that support these girls to help them achieve their possibilities. Just send us an email and we will be happy to help.
If you have recently started your startup and need a talent assessment tool, we can offer a free one year license in the hope that it will help grow your project.
Sincerely,
Massimo D.
Contact Us Here: https://www.bacu.me/contact.php
Alpha Female Society. 