The spirit of freedom and responsibility that drives many people to start a business, is what drove the founding fathers to break away and start this country. The battle cry of "Taxation without Representation" was a catch phrase that simply asked for freedom and responsibility.
Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand, you can't have one with out the other and have society progress. These days too many people are willing to give up both for security. Security is a myth that can never be achieved completely. The most secure people in the world are locked up in solitary confinement somewhere. I bet those guys would trade for freedom any day. The question is, would that take the responsibility that goes with it?
Benjamin Franklin is attributed to saying that you can't have Liberty and Security at the same time. He is right. They are polar opposites. With responsibility comes a little bit of risk. The key to success for today is understanding that you must manage risk in order to succeed.
Most people live in fear of the risk and responsibility of owning a business and therefore never enjoy the freedoms you can earn as the reward for managing the risk and accepting the responsibility.
The barriers to entry form many businesses also keep people out. Lawyers have to go to law school, pass the bar and still there are hundreds if not thousands of out of work lawyers or lawyers that have a different job. Just because you make it over the barrier doesn't mean you will succeed.
In a previous blog I encouraged you to act like an independent contractor at your job. Take more responsibility and manage more risk in exchange for a bit more freedom. If you could look back through time and watch me when I had a job, I learned to do exactly that from my mentors. I managed to work a 3/36 schedule so I could fly and play more while at one company. The deal was I had to outperform the 40 hour scheduled workers by 10% as well.
The company got 44 hours worth of work and only paid 36. It was a win-win. That mentality gave me the confidence to start my own business.
There are many businesses with very low barriers to entry, such as real estate. You can become a Realtor after a few classes and a test. Your total investment might only be $300 or so. The problem is that with such a low barrier to entry there are a lot of people doing it. This means starting out you will need a lot of patience and persistence to succeed. Or you need a much better way to get the job done by working smarter, not harder.
The best way to prepare yourself for starting a business is to look at all of the places in your life where you have traded liberty for security. Do you use unemployment regularly because you can't manage money? Do you "need" health insurance provided by your boss or the government? Do you work for someone else for the "security" of a paycheck every two weeks?
Can you manage your life if you didn't have any of these things? Stepping out on your own can be a scary thing, and at the same time getting over that fear is one of the greatest accelerators on the road to success. Many of the most successful business owners I know have done the "credit card shuffle" trying to pay bills they didn't have money to cover.
The pain and embarrassment of not making your bills is a defining moment for every entrepreneur. It is at that moment, you push a little harder and make it, or you give up and "go back to work". Like many successful people, I have done both at least once. The difference is that the minute I went back to work, the embarrassment didn't go away. There was no joy or happiness when that first check came in.
The last time I was shuffling money and missing payments, I dug in, and when that next client signed on, and that next check came in, it was a rotating beacon of emotions. First it was relief that turned to joy that turned to ecstasy, and within weeks, more clients, more books started selling, and more work came in.
If I didn't have to scrape to find quarters for the dollar menu, would I be where I am now? I can't say for sure. The biggest mistake you can make is getting locked into a failing method. I will admit when I dug in, I also changed my approach.
Don't get locked in on one idea, try to listen to the clients and figure out why they aren't buying and adjust accordingly. More importantly, in the infamous words of Winston Churchill, "Never, Never, Never, Give Up."
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Thank you for your insights.