Daniel Miller is the co-founder and president of Fundrise. Follow him @dan__miller.
Who’s your hero? (In business, life, or both.)
I’ve always looked up to my father.
What’s the single best piece of business advice that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?
Align your business with your interests. That way you will enjoy putting in the time and work needed to be successful — particularly as an entrepreneur, when work can become all-consuming.
What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your business, and what did you learn from it that others can learn from too?
When you feel momentum behind a concept you’re working on, eliminate as many unrelated projects as possible and put everything towards that idea. We started Fundrise to fund our own real estate projects. Looking back, I realized that we were too slow to shut down our real estate development business to focus exclusively on Fundrise.
What do you do during the first hour of your business day and why?
I complete one major task from the day before. Being an entrepreneur is all about making consistent progress, so if you focus on a single important task every morning, you will have laid the groundwork that you can continue to build on throughout the day.
What’s your best financial/cash-flow related tip for entrepreneurs just getting started?
Minimize expenses, always. Run things as tight as possible and wait to significantly increase spending until you have clear outputs. Unfortunately, the only way to truly learn this is to waste money yourself until realizing you could have ended up at the same point while spending much less.
Quick: What’s ONE thing you recommend ALL aspiring or current entrepreneurs do right now to take their biz to the next level?
Align your business with your interests. You don’t know how long it will take to be successful financially, so being happy with what you’re working on every day will give you the fulfillment needed to not get tied to the inevitable swings in business and life.
BusinessCollective, launched in partnership with Citi, is a virtual mentorship program powered by North America’s most ambitious young thought leaders, entrepreneurs, executives and small business owners.
