Three Hot Startup Tips From the Pros

Recently, I had the pleasure of serving as a panel moderator and business plan competition judge at Babson College's Forum on Entrepreneurship and Innovation. It was a terrific day filled with entrepreneurial wisdom straight from the trenches. Here's some solid start up advice from three highly successful and seasoned entrepreneurs who told their stories at Babson:

• Trust your instincts. Karen Fabbri, the founder of Moxi, two boutiques in Boston and Wellesley that sell shoes, bags, and accessories, talked about hiring a key manager during her early startup years. "I trusted her to run the store and I shared all my information with her," says Fabbri. But it soon became clear that Fabbri and her manager didn't share the same vision for the company. "It got to the point where I didn't feel comfortable going into my store," she says. "But I relied on her so much to run the company, that my fear of losing that prevented me from taking action." Fabbri ignored the "nagging voice in the back of my head" until things got ugly and the woman left to open her own competing store (which is now out of business, Fabbri says). Lesson: don't let fear prevent you from acting on what your gut tells you is the right thing to do.

• Don't lose focus. Roger Berkowitz, CEO of Legal Seafoods, has grown his family's fish market to a chain of 32 seafood restaurants over the past 18 years, but he still remembers when his professor in an executive education class at Harvard Business School gave him a reality check. "He singled me out and said, 'Berkowitz, what business are you in?' I told him 'the restaurant business.' He told me to do an environmental analysis of the company, due the next term. " Berkowitz labored over his assignment then handed in a 45-page paper. "Now what business are you in?" asked the professor. "The fish business," replied Berkowitz, without hesitation. The professor gave him a nod of approval: "Good," he replied. "Now go out and exploit your knowledge and do not lose focus." Berkowitz describes the incident as "a seminal moment." Lesson: figure out what you're really in and make sure that drives every decision you make about your business.

• Know what you don't know. When Joanna Meiseles started Snip-Its, a chain of children's hair salons, in 1995, she knew very little about starting a business and even less about cutting hair. But she knew that after taking her young son for his first haircut that there was a market for kid-friendly salons. She contacted a cousin in Seattle who had invested in an Italian restaurant and he offered to send her the business plan. "I didn't know how to write a business plan, so I basically copied that plan," she recalls. "Everywhere it said Cucina Cucina, I changed it to Snip-Its and every time it mentioned pasta, I changed it to hair trim." When she built her first store, she found herself managing builders and hiring hairdressers who she relied upon to help her stock her shops with the right tools; and when she decided to franchise, she teamed up with a Babson student who did a feasibility study for her. "I hired him and we started the franchise program together," she says. Lesson: Don't try to be all things to all people. Draw from existing resources and hire the right team so that you can step out of the trenches and thing strategically.