On my Business Owners and Entrepreneurs – Transition Guy Podcast I interviewed Jason Kingsley, the founder and CEO of the Rebellion Group. We discussed his journey into entrepreneurship and how technology has played a large part in his journey. Technology has changed dramatically over the last 40 years and during that time gaming has been an exciting and new market alongside the advent of the World Wide Web and computers in general. For Jason the gaming business was his passion and he decided to make it his career.
Passion business
Deciding to do something is the biggest hurdle for an entrepreneur. Good ideas are hard to have. Lots of people have good ideas but they don’t do anything about it. You can’t control that opportunities will come along at the right time. What you can control is your response to any opportunity and how you build on them. Do you embrace them or reject them? Fortune throws different things at different people, good and bad. Our real journey is how we deal with those circumstances.
Growth
Growth is often the fastest at the beginning. You come up with an idea and then by the time you’ve employed your first member of staff, you’ve got an enormous, infinite growth rate at that very moment. By the time you’ve got your first office, you’ve got five or six people working there and it suddenly becomes a big responsibility.
Choosing clients and teams:
Choose to work with people you like. It is an ongoing challenge to choose good people to work with. Somebody might be really good on paper, but they won’t slot into the organisation properly. One of the biggest challenges is, when you are hiring very rapidly, how do you maintain the positive aspects of the company that’s caused you to grow? When you are onboarding people, help them understand what makes the company great and get them to share in that exciting journey as well, because in an ideal world, everybody that works for you should be enjoying the process of creating something cool.
Negotiating
You have got to have empathy when you’re negotiating. What are the other people trying to achieve? There are often log jams in negotiations and you have to try and work out what they are. They are rarely about the fundamentals of the deal. If person A and person B want to do a deal, there’s usually a reason they both want to do the deal. So what is it, what are the details that are getting in the way and what are they trying to protect by inputting a certain clause? Or conversely, what are they trying to guarantee by a certain clause? Think about why you would object to it?
Challenges
Negotiating from a position of weakness is always harder than negotiating from a position of strength. Many businesses are finding themselves in tough times economically. Work out what you can save? How can you turn a bad thing into a better thing? Failure brings growth and development as well.
If you want to talk about your entrepreneurial journey and how to plan forward – get in touch
Remember, failing to learn is learning to fail.
