Tips to build trust in an entrepreneurial context
Becoming trustworthy is one basic characteristic for every entrepreneur, even before start running a business. Customers seek out trustworthy people and evaluate entrepreneurs to see who they can trust. In order to be a trustworthy entrepreneur and establish your own audience, keep in mind to:
- Be willing to make commitments.
As an entrepreneur, you should have the strength to be able to make commitments and make promises, within the contexts you can accomplish them. The main characteristic of unreliable people is that they refuse to make promises, as they think that making no commitments relieves them of any anxious feeling about breaking them. People see and understand this strategy immediately and will think of you as a not reliable and not trustworthy entrepreneur.
- Under commit and over deliver.
You have to be sure about the commitments you give. You should be able to fulfil them. There is great number of entrepreneurs who over-commit due to the need to have business constituents, yet the quickest way to lose respect is to fail to keep commitments.
- Protect your personal brand.
As a new start-up entrepreneur, you are your own brand. As every movement you make affects your brand, your trustworthiness is your most valuable asset.
- Formalize business promise keeping.
This means updating all your promises into formal actions. You should follow formal procedures between partners and vendors, customer transactions.
- Communicate, communicate, communicate.
Communication is the major cornerstone for your business. You have to admit that you will face failures, yet through communication you can inform every interested person and avoid displeasing surprises. Lack of communication allows others to assume that you had no intention of keeping your promises and hoped that no one would notice.
- Aim past the target.
It is impossible to be trustworthy in business if you are unreliable in the other aspects of your life. The monks teach that trust is not a business strategy or tactic; it is the natural by-product of living for a higher purpose. If you have no higher purpose as an entrepreneur than to make money, you will most likely fail in your efforts (Forbes, 2013). Grounded in the understanding that migrants are by no means a homogeneous population, but rather have different needs and skills sets, is also a key success factor of migrant entrepreneurship support initiatives. More specifically, the practices analysed point to the added value of fostering a personal relationship between service providers/trainers and beneficiaries. This can help build trust between the migrants and the institutions as on many occasions’ migrants, and especially those who have been persecuted in their home countries, tend to foster distrust towards authorities.
