Anyone who tells you it’s an easy life is lying.
—
Becoming an entrepreneur can be an awesome experience. In one fell swoop, you emphatically say, “I’m never going to work for someone else again,” and “I control my own time and destiny.”
It’s empowering, and you almost feel yourself fulfilling the American dream.
A major appeal of owning your own company is being paid what you deserve.
|
As we plan our business ideas or leap into selling a product, our minds flood with visions of how we can help our parents, be a role model for our kids, and be the type of man we’ve always wanted to be.
But for all its upside potential, the road to becoming a successful entrepreneur is a bumpy one, and you can be blindsided by a few, seldom-discussed hard truths about venturing out on your own.
♦◊♦
Here are five truths about being an entrepreneur you won’t find in the books, but they’re a crucial part of every entrepreneur’s success story.
1. You shouldn’t do it for the money
A major appeal of owning your own company is being paid what you deserve. If you work twice as hard at a day your job, you obviously won’t get paid twice as much overnight.
But as an entrepreneur, your income potential is directly based on your performance and hard work. However—especially in the beginning—you’ll likely be drastically underpaid for the hours you’re putting in.
It’s about sacrifice over salary for the first few years, and you (as well as your family) need to be prepared for this. Overnight success stories are often bold-faced lies. Instead, success is normally the product of years of hard work, compounded over time.
If you stick to it, the challenges you endure today will pay off in the future, hopefully in a big way. So if you’re jumping to into business to get rich quick, you better get out fast.
The money only comes after you’ve put in the work and added massive value. That certainly can’t happen in a day.
2. You’ll be lonely and feel like friends and family just don’t understand
Beyond capital, advisors, or any advanced marketing techniques, starting a business requires time. Especially when you’re getting things off the ground.
It’s common for entrepreneurs to spend 12 to 15 hours a day, grinding, creating and pushing for more sales. What often gets overlooked, though, is that between business hours and eating and sleeping, you have little time left for relationships.
Many days, you’ll be completely alone, and sometimes our family and friends won’t understand our obsession. They’ll drop seeds of doubt like “Why do you do this without making any REAL money?” or “Don’t you think you’re working too much?”
While balance is important, you can’t listen to their doubts or waste too much time being defensive. Learn how to clearly communicate your vision and the importance of this in your life, and the people that really care about you will understand. The rest will run for the hills and come back in droves when you’re a huge success.
3. You’ll fall in love with an idea, and it’ll come back to bite you
When starting a business, entrepreneurs often have the best intentions. We want to change the world, help people, be our own boss, and create legacies for our families and friends. However, in the beginning it’s easy to be deluded by our visions of the future and forget the actual reasons businesses exist: to solve problems for people.
Remembering this sounds so simple, but it’s really difficult to execute. After spending hours (or years) dreaming, envisioning, and developing and products and services, entrepreneurs often fall in love with the idea itself, instead of the market demand and need for the solution.
It hurts to shred an idea after pouring thousands of hours into it, but ultimately, successful entrepreneurs learn to put the customer’s needs first and then create the product. Do it any other way, and you’re sure to get burned.
4. You’ll have to learn the intricacies of marketing and sales
We’ve all heard about the “if you build, they will come” fallacy. And intellectually, we know it’s not true. As budding entrepreneurs we think, “That’ll never be me!” or “How could anyone think that?”
But when you put your solution on the market and few, if any, are immediately interested, you’ll inevitably experience a healthy dose of doubt.
However, instead of squandering hours questioning your abilities, you’ll quickly learn to channel your fear and doubt into sales and marketing. These two areas are the lifeblood of business. They’re also the nitty-gritty parts we don’t like to think about.
As entrepreneurs, we love spending time on the big-picture ideas, but if no one knows about your products, just how beneficial can they be? It’s a reality that rocks the world of many first-time business owners. But understanding this is all-powerful for your long-term success.
5. You will feel frazzled
Because things only get more hectic and chaotic if you don’t lay the foundation of your business on a solid plan.
|
As an entrepreneur, every day you wake up you’ve got to grind to get your products, services, and ideas in front of the right people. There are a million-and-one different things vying for your attention. And ton’s of tactics to pursue.
Because of this, it’s really difficult to focus on any one thing and have a consistent plan. Some days you’ll feel so stressed and overwhelmed, you won’t even know where to begin.
♦◊♦
To some extent, this is unavoidable, but before you dive head first into creating your product, and perfecting your sales, you’ll want to make sure you have a detailed plan.
Include the hours you plan on working on certain things, what you need to research, and what you need to focus on step-by-step.
Down the road you’ll thank yourself if you do this. Because things only get more hectic and chaotic if you don’t lay the foundation of your business on a solid plan.
—
Flickr/ Richard Giles
Excellent article. Ross Perot in his book Principles of Success, also say that same thing that when you start a business, it is not about making money but providing great services and products and that making money is a by product of providing those two items.
Another thing that Perot stated was workers and managers should get the same benefits like stock options where at GM the workers did not get stock options.
So true. Successful entrepreneurs often give the impression, maybe unintentionally, that it might be even wrong to talk much about failures and hardships, as it might deter you from “winning”, “crushing it” or whatever. To me your honesty is actually motivating, since it transforms the imaginary ideal to reality. Imaginary problems do not have solutions. Real ones do. In essence it’s a job with ups and downs just like any other. Thumbs up!