From aerospace engineer to entrepreneur, I help technical minds turn their expertise into thriving businesses. Each week, I share raw insights on transforming engineering mindsets into business success - from crafting memorable introductions to winning premium clients. No corporate jargon, no "fake it till you make it" - just real experiences and proven approaches for engineers ready to grow beyond their technical roots.
How to Find 💎 Diamonds in The Rough ? My Three Go-to Sources
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Ever wondered how to find your niche? your ideal customer profile? your unfair advantage ? your unique differentiator ? your mission ? the right problem to solve ? Data is important, but It's not only about "data", here are my favorite 3 go-to sources for insight and how we can extract those nuggets of gold. 3️⃣ "within" extracted through a good question that makes you peel all the superficial onion layers to get to the core. My go-to question: The Dan Sullivan Question, he wrote a whole book on this question ! "If we were having this discussion three years from today, and you were to look back over those three years to today, what has to have happened, both personally and professionally, for you to feel happy about your progress?" 2️⃣ "the other" extracted through a 1:1 conversation built on genuine curiosity, empathy and good questions A good resource, made for "technical minds" : "The Mom Test : How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you"
by Rob Fitzpatrick
1️⃣ "hidden in plain sight" extracted by setting the right filter. Remember that car brand you loved ? boom it's everywhere ! My go-to way : In-person workshop "Positioning Engineered", there we connect emotionally at the intersection of us & them (Venn Diagram), resulting in a "catharsis" ⚡️ that makes participants see new opportunities that were right there, hidden in plain sight. The right filter in its basic form is : [people we care most about] x [a painful problem they want to eliminate] = 💎. Because as humans 👣 we innately understand and empathise with other humans, and human problems. Our brains doesn't need to make an effort to process it. Unlike features, solutions, big categories likes "businesses", "SME", "startups" .... our brain hasn't evolve to connect emotionally to those "abstract" concepts. Want to learn more ? I will share more in our free community "Engineers Can Talk"
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The Entrepreneurial Engineer
From aerospace engineer to entrepreneur, I help technical minds turn their expertise into thriving businesses. Each week, I share raw insights on transforming engineering mindsets into business success - from crafting memorable introductions to winning premium clients. No corporate jargon, no "fake it till you make it" - just real experiences and proven approaches for engineers ready to grow beyond their technical roots.
Pick one. Anyone, but pick one. I learned from our cousins the “creatives” that my biggest obstacle to build a profitable service business lays in “my creativity” what ?? Entrepreneurial engineers are a form of creative entrepreneurs. We are so “curious” we can’t help but when facing several doors, we want to open every single one of them. It’s almost compulsive. Which curious mind can live with themselves leaving one stone unturned ? We proud ourselves into being “solution-oriented”,...
Unlike Professor X, we can't get into people's head and tell them what to do. But there's something else we can do. My first job as an avionics engineer was to update the embedded software of an Fighter's Electronic Warfare Equipment so it would store and manage data in FlashPROM instead of EEPROM. Sounds easy, just replace an electronic component with another, and boom it's done. Well, that system was an existing and robust one, built more than a few decades back, and I could not use all the...
We've created this amazing solution, how do we sell it ? As AI takes center stage, I’m seeing a flood of firms churning out “amazing solutions” for problems that might not even exist. 🤨 This made me think of Eric Ries's "The Lean Startup", when I read that book in my early years of avionics software development, and up to that point I lived under the impression that we were at the top technological advancement ... that's when it hit me. "No Othmane, you are working on a known solution, for a...