The Credibility Factor
As an entrepreneur and business owner, you have to be able to inspire trust and confidence in your customers, employees, JV partners, etc. People have to know and believe that you are a credible, trustworthy expert in your industry, or they won’t do business with you.
As a young entrepreneur, this is one of the challenges I struggled with the most when I was first starting out. As a 16 year old, many people were somewhat less apt to respect my expertise or knowledge than they would that of a 50 year old. Not to mention the fact that I had not developed the leadership skills that many older business people have had the years to develop. Without trust and credibility, you can’t influence people, and without influence, you fail.
If you are a entrepreneur (young or not), you have probably experienced the Credibility Factor. People will usually communicate their hesitance to trust your expertise in subtle ways – not making the purchase, for example. When I was first starting out, I lost a few sales because the person did not trust me enough to give me their credit card details.
Increasing Your Credibility
Credibility, trust, influence, and leadership are closely related subjects. As John Maxwell says, leadership is influence – nothing more, nothing less. But you cannot have influence without trust – people do not follow someone whom they do not trust.
If you want people to trust, believe and follow you, I suggest that you read Developing The Leader Within You, by John C. Maxwell. This book has been more influential in developing my leadership skills than any other book.
The Age Variable For Young Entrepreneurs
As I mentioned, I believe that age is a variable in the credibility factor. As I also related, I had very low credibility when I started out. That was nearly 5 years ago, though, and a lot has changed. I’m not a master leader by any stretch of the imagination, but I have learned and developed enough skills so that I can make large sales, recruit and motivate teams, etc. But I am digressing – the question is how young entrepreneurs can overcome the age barrier and develop trust and influence with older people.
I’ve found three ways to overcome age constraints:
- Become so good at what you do that people have to respect you. If you are obviously an expert at something, people will trust you, regardless of your age.
- Switch to an area where your age increases your credibility. I used this tactic by moving to the internet. Young people are often stereotyped as geeks, so people actually trusted me more because I was in an industry that they naturally expected me to be good at.
- Improve your leadership skills so that you can inspire trust and influence people regardless of your age.
If you are a young entrepreneur, keep in mind that people are not being prejudiced against you. They are just making decisions based on their perceptions of you as a young person. Your job is to present yourself to people in a way that will make them realize that you are trustworthy, honest, knowledgeable, etc.
At root, the issue is not age. The issue is credibility. People do not make decisions based on reality. They make their decisions based on their perception of reality. Learn how to make people perceive you as a credible person, and you can succeed.
Great book Developing The Leader Within. And it is true older people do respect the youth when it comes to tech subjects and internet topics. They know our learning curve is much better and are willing to pay for it. Also, Dressing the part of a professional helps with gaining mutual respect. Also a MUST in my opinion are people skills, and effective communication skills!