Entrepreneurs often tend to ignore details and spend time focusing on the high level, but we need to pay attention to the details if we want to have long term success. Building businesses take time and there is no other way around it.
Paying attention to the details does not mean that you have to be a highly organized person; you can hire someone else to do that for you. In fact, you should find someone that is very organized and can set you up so that you are able to easily find the information that you need fast. This person needs to like to handle details, but not be the kind of person that wants to be in front of everybody. Essentially this person needs to make you look good.
Finding success as an entrepreneur relies on knowing what your customers want before they know they want it. You want to lead them to it. This has been the prime reason I have been able to negotiate mega deals with billion dollar companies when my company was just a little start-up company.
I took the time to figure out what the industry needed and then spent the rest of my time figuring out how to give it to them. I have literally set in a meeting where a customer was asking for a specific application to be built a year down the road, while on the overhead I had my technology guy pull the application up and said, “You mean just like this?”
I anticipated what my customer needed, and had it built before I had a deal with them. When they asked for it, I gave it to them a year before they expected it. I paid attention to the details and got the contract without any further discussion.
When you pay attention to the details, you are able to do deals like this.