Michele Romanow’s 3 top tips for budding entrepreneurs

Michele Romanow is one of Canada’s most successful entrepreneurs and investors. Here she gives guidance to up-and-coming startup founders on how to make it big.

Michelle Romanow is many things: a TV personality, a board director, a founder, and a venture capitalist. From starring on the hit Canadian TV show Dragons’ Den to being named on the “100 Most Powerful Women in Canada” list in 2015, she is a tech entrepreneur adept at using a diversity of skills to achieve her goals.

As an experienced VC, Michele has also pioneered a new form of funding deal (made famous in her appearances on Dragon’s Den), offering full investment for 10 percent of the interested business, plus six percent interest until the initial investment is paid back.

Clearly a founder-focused investor, Michele has offered three key pieces of guidance for young entrepreneurs:

1. Entrepreneurship is about stickability

“Fundamentally, successful people do what unsuccessful people are unwilling to do.”

Founders should not underestimate the importance of resilience. Getting a business off the ground is one of the hardest things to do in the early days – if you ride those high waves, you’re more likely to succeed as time goes on.

2. Stop planning and get going

“Planning is a crutch to make you feel really good. It’s like reading a dieting book about needing to eat salad and not eating salad yourself – it’s going to make no difference.”

Action is critical for founders. Better to trial several plans and see them fail then spend too long creating a water-tight plan that may sink you anyway.

3. Great innovation comes from iteration

“What that means is you’re failing 80 percent of the time. To this day, 80 percent of the ideas I try do not work. You’re constantly trying to leverage the 20 percent of what’s working to build something bigger.”

Failure isn’t an issue – conceding defeat it. This is where resilience, and a willingness to fail and try again, come full circle.

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Main image of Michele Romanow onstage at Collision 2022 in Toronto: Harry Murphy/Web Summit (CC BY 2.0)