Treat your personal time with the same discipline and dedication with which you approach your work. When an entrepreneur sets up a pattern of hours, it's never temporary. Pick a sane work week and stick with it. Dealing with gatekeepers. Write directly to the CEO, or call and leave a voice-mail message, Applegate advises.
Great ideas are a dime a dozen.
It's easy to develop products and services customers should want. To find out what they actually do want requires some tedious legwork. Use those interviews to find out what people want out of the products or services similar to yours, how much they're willing to pay and what makes them choose one vendor over another. Invite to your focus-group sessions the kinds of people who are likely to become customers. A simple way to survey potential customers if your target market is local is to call one out of every 10 or so people listed in the phone book.