Small business owners have inherently conquered a great number of challenges such as securing funding from investors, designing their website and store (if it’s a brick and mortar shop), attracting customers, and maintaining their startup as they work toward growth. That last point is often the hardest involved in entrepreneurship as evidenced by the fact that only half of small businesses make it longer than five years. A lack of capital is the most common reason so many businesses fail, and maintaining capital has been made even harder for business owners due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
Roivant Sciences CEO, Vivek Ramaswamy, explains how his company and others in the private sector are working toward creating therapeutics and a potential vaccine for Covid-19. Roivant is dedicated to providing innovative medicine and technology to patients by creating Vants. These are biotech and healthcare companies specializing in different areas to offer new solutions in the best ways possible. Great examples are Axovant, which specializes in neurological developments, and Respivant, which helps patients with respiratory diseases. The Roivant family includes both pharmaceutical veterans and leaders from other industries. Ramaswamy breaks down great leadership strategies and qualities that successful entrepreneurs can apply to their own business.
Prioritization
When discussing COVID in the United States, Vivek stresses the importance of prioritizing testing and treatment of severe and high-risk patients. Vivek also discusses the importance of exploring options such as an RNA-based vaccine as well as more conventional options but that we should temper expectations for having a working vaccine in under a year.
Being able to prioritize tasks and set realistic goals are crucial qualities for any leader. As a business owner, you might consider adopting objectives and key results (OKRs) as your management framework. This is a goal-setting framework meant to help leaders set transparent company objectives and measure their progress toward them. This helps ensure all team members are aligned with your overall goals and lets you determine whether your goals are realistic at the moment.
Roivant’s Ramaswamy also speaks about incentives for those in the private sector and how cancer researchers in the U.S. are incentivized to a much greater extent than researches dealing with infectious diseases. The best leaders give more attention to issues as they become more relevant.
Proactivity
The best leaders are constantly active in pursuing greater goals and dealing with potential threats, whether that’s addressing public relations issues or security threats. Roivant puts in the hard work to drive innovation and create promising drugs in many pharmaceutical areas and no doubt employs serious security measures to keep their research safe. No matter what kind of business you’re in, you can use security intelligence platforms to locate potential threats to your business.
LifeRaft offers a platform that collects and analyzes data from open sources like social media, online message boards, blogs, and even the deep web. When threatening posts or comments are detected, Life Raft can send you automated alerts letting you ascertain the legitimacy of potential threats as they emerge and act on them accordingly. Keep in mind that LifeRaft doesn’t alert you to cybersecurity attacks of any kind. Rather, this technology detects threatening messages, such as someone on a forum making a threat to directly attack your headquarters or your customers.
Humility
Ramaswamy also stresses the importance of humility in leaders. Vivek freely admits the U.S. response to COVID could have been better and hopes that if any silver lining can come out of this crisis it’s that leaders can stay humble and everyone in the country can realize that we’re all in this situation together. The best business leaders realize that they’re acting in the interests of everyone in their company and all of their customers, and one of the best tips for entrepreneurs and business owners is to tailor their actions to reflect that.
