Entrepreneur, do you now to make good partnerships?

Difficulties do not take long to appear when we work directly with other people. These problems are of the most varied types and natures, and which would easily be the subject of one post a day on our blog. Due to these difficulties, we occasionally think that working alone could be more profitable and less stressful. This is where it can be helpful to remember the famous quote by the English writer John Donne – “No man is an island”. As important as the individual focus moments in which we work on something that requires great concentration are, it is important to remember that we don’t have all the answers and that there are problems that we cannot solve because we limit the possible solutions when we’re doing it alone. By creating networks of partnerships, it is possible to expand our possibilities, which are so necessary in this economic crisis period.

Astrophysics and micro entrepreneurship

This is not a text that will give you tips in the form of topics on how to be a high-successful entrepreneur or even offer secret tools. “Do this and enjoy the potatoes of the winner you will be”. Instead, I’ll write about the basics – “how to work” – and I’ll use what I’ve learned from astrophysics as an example to tell you about a great way to do business.

The Paralympic’s lesson for us, entrepreneurs

Effort, Discipline, Love – it is needed everything to succeed

The Olympic Games were a big party, and it was not guaranteed but expected. What has surprised us is the success and attention that the Paralympics got.

Surely, seeing 4 (four!) paralympic athletes running the 1,500 meters with paces that would win the gold prize at the Olympic Games in the month before is a news that gets us open mouthed. The two million tickets sold, that puts Rio 2016 in the second place of the biggest Paralympics editions, is also memorable. But what touches our inmost are the examples of athletes’ overcoming.

Giving with courage, conscience and protagonism

When we talk about the topic of donations, Brazil has undergone some timid transformations. According to the World Giving Index, the most comprehensive study on this topic carried out by the Gallup Institute and CAF, there was an increase of almost 2.5 million “acts of kindness” performed by Brazilians in 2014 compared to the previous year. Despite this, the country fell 15 positions in the global ranking (to the bitter 105th position) and there are no signs of improvement due to the ongoing economic recession.

Microentrepreneurs and the anti-crisis mindset

In the current economic crisis, the effect on microentrepreneurs who we work with, cannot be ignored. After all, individual microentrepreneurs’ income fell by 20% between April 2015 and 2016 in the city of São Paulo, according to Sebrae-SP Indicators research. These numbers materialized themselves as a loss of creativity sparkles in people’s eyes: in our visits, we see that many are inert, as if they were just waiting for the crisis to pass, without new ideas and projects. In the face of the difficulties of this crisis, how to respond to the new needs of entrepreneurs? If everyone is blasé, how to bring fire into the boiler of the locomotive that represents these hardworking people? If they are shut in themselves, what to do to make them open? How to make a barrier turn into a lever?

Disorganization: the silent killer of your business

There is a foundation of any activity that becomes essential for an entrepreneur. It´s basic, so simple that it seems kind of boring: personal organization. Without it, the best efforts and urges get in the way and stops people from reaching results, resulting in disappointment, frustration and, in the end, inertia.

Unpaid bills, angry customers due to forgetfulness, damaged inventory material and a feeling of drowning in tasks that overlay one another, in a growing disorder, where the urgent always gets above the important. A brief conversation with entrepreneurs is enough to gather dozens of examples. Only one out of every 30 dissatisfied customers explicitly complains about an unpleasant experience: lack of organization can be the silent killer of your business.

Working together to foster development and growth

Since 2012, Aventura de Construir (AdC) has been working relentlessly to awaken people’s protagonism, and has been assertively assisting its own beneficiaries.

Our perspective develops through daily contact with the micro-entrepreneurs we assist: we seek to go deep into the issues that beset people and we believe that, by understanding their context we can turn this experience into content for our audience. Via dialogue and interaction with the different circumstances found, we were able to assess that this is a solid path to foster development and to face the current “change of times” in which we find ourselves.

How to strengthen your social project

In the Third Sector world, when we talk about critical factors for the success of a development project, the first things that come to our mind are traditional axes of a project management, such as schedule, budget, if the scope is clear, who will be the team executing the project, how will monitoring and evaluation take place – the list is long and can be complemented by methodologies such as the PMI. To Aventura de Construir those questions have always been taken very seriously, just remind yourself about the dozens of quarterly reports developed deep diving into those themes and many others.