The Entrepreneurs with Ben Lehnert & Derek Lidow

Every entrepreneur needs to be acutely aware of what other brands their customers invite into their lives, why and how to set themselves apart from other brands. In this sprint, Ben and Derek walk you through how you get this deeper understanding and can then intentionally make decisions to differentiate your brand in the market. First, we teach you how to create a visual brand map that will help...

Founders need to understand what a brand is and how it is developed and formed. A brand takes time to develop and cannot be fully formed until your core team is in place and you have introduced your product or service broadly. In this sprint, Ben and Derek challenge you to start thinking about the branding process so that you do not make any naïve missteps along the way. This is not a one and done...

Mentors are often life changing for entrepreneurs and founders. But reaching out to someone who you see as a role model but don’t know can be scary. In this week’s episode, Ben and Derek discuss how you successfully create a relationship with a potential mentor. This episode prompts to you also listen to Sprint 8, 9 and 10 to learn the basics skills of relationship building.

Almost all entrepreneurs either over plan or do not plan at all. In this sprint, Derek and Ben describe specifically what level of planning and anticipation of the future makes most sense for an entrepreneur once they feel their idea has potential. As the entrepreneur now wants to invest some time and money in working out how to turn the idea into an actual product or service a customer is gladly...

Founding a company and leading it from being just an idea to actually serving customers and prospering for many years is extremely challenging. In this episode, Ben and Derek will help you reflect on the learnings and coachings from Sprints 7-16. Doing so, will help you set your personal priorities, which can be difficult under the pressure of a startup. You will learn to create a Personal Leaders...

In this episode, Ben and Derek cover one of the leading causes for startups and businesses to fail. In the US, over half of all startups have more than one founder. On a global basis, over 75% of all startups involve a family member. Once a startup finds traction for their product, co-founder conflict is the biggest cause of failure. Only 1 in 4 founding teams stay together for more than four year...

Keeping with the metaphor we used in sprint 14 of waking up and finding yourself at the control of an airplane, in this sprint we describe how to pilot the takeoff, climb, cruise and landing of your enterprise. The takeoff, climb, cruise and landing correspond to 4 very specific stages of enterprise maturity. In the previous sprint you learned about the 3 essential flight controls: projects, proce...

Leading a startup can generate the same feelings as you might have in a nightmare where you found yourself having to take the controls of a jumbo jet running out of fuel. You have only the vaguest ideas of what a few of the controls do, how the plane reacts and what it takes to find a place to land, let alone land it. In this sprint, Ben and Derek describe the essential basics of how a startup cre...

Startup leaders NEED to understand and master the specific skills required to align and keep aligned each of the Five Ducks. In this sprint, Ben and Derek go into detail on the best methods for doing the initial alignment and then for monitoring alignment and for re-aligning as might be required by unforeseen circumstances. Check out this and all other free sprints at https://www.theentrepreneurs....

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io/sprint-library If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. People feel uncomfortable with change and resist it, yet startups must constantly change to improve customer and user experiences, respond to changing economic and competitive conditions, and to accommodate and assimilate...

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io/sprint-library If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. Building powerful relationships with the people on your team is essential to work effectively, but you need a different set of skills to get strangers or groups of people whom you don’t know personally to help you achieve...

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. Shared objectives are at the core of all relationships. It is important that you can identify and dissect any relationship into its separate shared objectives. To illustrate this we will go into detail about the various shared objective...

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. The most basic of all relationships is: communicating. You communicate with many people, whether you like it or realize it. In this sprint, Derek and Ben coach you to understand the cooperating, competing and retreating types of communi...

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. This sprint coaches you on how to master skills required to build strong relationships with almost anyone and help others make their relationships more productive. We want to help you understand how to work effectively with almost anyon...

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. Starting your own business is stressful. But making good decisions in high-pressure moments doesn’t have to freak you out. In this episode, Ben and Derek walk you through how to stay level-headed and make better decisions. Accurately un...

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. In this episode, Ben and Derek explain the last missing piece in the “capturing happy customer” puzzle is figuring how much they would be willing to pay. You can ask a potential customer, but their answer may not be a good choice for yo...

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. In this episode, Ben and Derek coach you how to think through how many customers you can reasonably expect to capture (while the next sprint leads you through how much they might pay). To figure out how many customers you might get, we...

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. In this episode, Ben and Derek walk you through how to figure out exactly which group of potential customers most wants what you will offer. We explain how you find the persona that will be easiest and most profitable to make super happ...

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. In this episode, Ben and Derek explain how to properly test your idea with potential customers. Until you confirm your idea for making groups of strangers very happy works, it doesn’t make sense to invest the time and money to implement...

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io If you’re looking for more personal support, guidance and accountability, join our membership. In this episode, Ben and Derek walk you through how to find good ideas for your startup, buy understanding how to tell and eliminate bad ones. First, you will learn about The Fundamental Principle of Entrepreneurship which underlies eve...

Read additional material for this sprint on: www.theentrepreneurs.io For more support, accountability and support join our membership. In this first sprint episode we explore the importance of understanding one's own deep motivation for wanting to be an entrepreneur and the correlation with success. We emphasize the significance of preparation and learning in the entrepreneurial journey, as well a...

Explore our expanding library of free sprints on www.theentrepreneurs.io For more support, accountability and support join our membership. Welcome to The Entrepreneurs ! This first episode introduces our brand-new platform and the concept of sprints to deliver critical entrepreneurial insights, tested and proven tools, and self-guided exercises to help you succeed on your startup journey. All spri...