Arvand Sabetian is the founder of a web solutions company, Arvixe, with extensive knowledge in virtual hosting environments and remote workplace management. The near 120 staff members at Arvixe currently service over 250,000 websites with gross revenues of over $12M. In 2013, he was placed on Inc Magazine’s coveted 30 under 30 list. Read more @ http://go.arvixe.com/30under30.

Who is your hero? 

My parents.

What’s the single best piece of business advice that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?

To me, being a true entrepreneur means creating businesses that generate profit without the need for ridiculous amounts of capital infusion. And to do that, you need to be the salesman, the product engineer, and the manager. You can’t build a company until you know the company you want to build, inside and out.

Do you know what your product is, how it was made, why your customers want it, and how you can sell it?

What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your business, and what did you learn from it that others can learn from too?

Biggest mistakes for me are always the shots I didn’t take. Those are always the hardest to learn from as well. You can’t turn back the clock and opportunities present themselves in a variety of ways. They never repeat themselves.

My advice is to run with it. If you find a product and a niche that sells, don’t settle. Pick it up and go as far as you can, as quickly as you can. The chance you’ve stumbled upon may not always be around, so don’t think too much.

What do you do during the first hour of your business day and why?

Check Skype and communicate with staff. Remote work places lack the “feel” that regular offices have. Staff rely on basic modes of communication to gain assistance, see acknowledgement or simply touch base.

“Basic modes of communication” such as Skype and email are for us the bare bones of our business. The sooner I can respond to staff, the better the workplace will be.

What’s your best financial or cash-flow related tip for entrepreneurs just getting started?

People always ask me where I went to start a business, how many bank accounts I opened and how I started accepting credit cards.

The fact is, I couldn’t charge the first five hosting accounts I signed up for. I didn’t have a way to charge their cards. I didn’t even have a business account or an organization established. Why worry about how you are going to charge cards when you don’t have any cards to charge?

Get the customers. Make sure that your idea works. If it doesn’t, and you haven’t put a year into setting up your business. Move on to something that will work much faster.

Quick: What’s ONE thing you recommend ALL aspiring or current entrepreneurs do right now to take their biz to the next level?

Try to think like your current customers. Put your yourself in their shoes. Every so often, stop and take a step back. Really try to figure out why your customers are using you and how you would think of your business if you were in the market for your own product.

What’s your definition of success? How will you know when you’ve finally “succeeded” in your business?

Success for me is feeling satisfied and excited about what I’m doing. You never really stop and say, “Wow, this very moment is the moment in which I feel successful.”

In relation to Arvixe, I was successful when I was playing around with websites and found different hosting products to sell, when I reached out to those very first few customers, and when I had my staff take on some of the very tasks I never thought I could pass on.

As long as I’m enjoying what I’m doing, I’ve succeeded.