Businessman, investor and philanthropist Farrah Gray wrote, “Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.” Which do you prefer to do?
Entrepreneurship has been defined as the “…capacity and willingness to develop, organize, and manage a business venture along with any of its risks to make a profit”.
Not everyone has what it takes and not everyone wants to do what it takes to start, launch, and scale a company of their own.
Starting a business is not for the faint hearted, neither is it a way of getting recognition as a “CEO” or “CO-FOUNDER“. It involves a much larger dream bigger than the founder that gives no room for “let’s see how it goes”.
A recent study out of New York University found that the percentage of students who want to start a business declined while attending an entrepreneurship summer camp. Before starting the BizCamp program, a whopping 91 percent of the kids enrolled said that they wanted to own a business. But as they learned about the pitfalls of owning a business, there was an 85 percent decrease in the number of students who wanted to start their own company.
Being an entrepreneur is a luxury risk that not many can take on. If you have a family of 4 depending on your paycheck, and you don’t have enough savings to let you spend the next 2 years, learning how to make money for yourself, being an entrepreneur is not going to be easy. It is even worse if you don’t have the skill set to figure out how to manage the business so it won’t go belly up.
The worst thing about the entrepreneur hype though, are the people who get caught up in the idea of it, but then don’t know or don’t want to learn what they need to do to run a business from the ground up. Like really?
So, having said all these things, If you still desire to be an entrepreneur, here are a few tips to help;
TIMING IS EVERYTHING
For the first few years, your time is very expensive, it is your currency of exchange. There is no resumption or closing time, everything revolves around development, growth, sustainable increase.
So likewise, you need to know when to move from your bedroom to a workspace, when to stop telling the world about your ideas and start implementing them, you need to be willing to take on all the criticism in good faith, like it or not, that’s what the market would look like.
BABY STEPS, GIANT STRIDES
Take the small steps, learn, pause, take it all in, make sure you are still on the right path, keep learning.
And when you succeed, forecast your own future to determine if you have the availability, support, funds and readiness to take on what could be the most challenging, and hopefully most rewarding, venture of your life.
KNOW WHEN TO SEEK HELP
No one is an island, I can’t overemphasize that fact, why take on the task of multiple people, when clearly it is not your strongest point. As much as you want to fight it, feel you can handle the heat, you can’t.
Please ask for help: create a board, hire a professional attorney, a professional accountant, mentors, business minded people that have gone through your road at one point or another.
The process of launching a startup and leading it down the path towards success requires stamina. It is a marathon not a sprint. There will be days that you will feel unmotivated, depressed and unsure of whether you should keep going, these are the days in which knowing the answer to “Why am I doing what I am doing?” is so important.
Keep marching forward. No one said starting a company would be easy, they only said it would be worth it!
Are you an Entrepreneur? and you have scale your business to profit… Let’s hear your thoughts about becoming an entrepreneur, share briefly your experience with us in the comment section below.
