The Life of an Entrepreneur

Becoming an entrepreneur can be very exciting but is rarely very glamorous.  Managing the daily activities of running a business can be anything but a dream.  Unless you’re just working on a hobby, your days won’t be easy and worry-free, particularly in the beginning.  But if you really have a passion for the business you are creating, you’ll find the life of an entrepreneur to be much more fulfilling and rewarding than any job working for someone else.

Starting and running your own business is a liberating idea but we, as entrepreneurs, can’t afford to see it with rose-colored glasses.  We need to enter the world of the entrepreneur with realistic expectations.  There will be times when you’ll be floating on air and other times when you just want to crawl into a corner and sleep.

As owner, manager and chief bottle washer, you will be wearing many hats.   Some of those many hats will fit just fine because you’ve worn them before while you will probably need to learn new skills that you’ve never done before in order to make the other hats fit.  You may need to rearrange your priorities by determining what is really important and what isn’t.  This one step may even make you reconsider and determine that now is not necessarily the best time in your life to start a business.

Decisions need to be made that are very different from your past 9 to 5 job.

When late hours are needed to get a job done, you do them!

When you have to clean up your own mess, you get it done.

If money is tight, a need to downgrade your familiar lifestyle in order to increase your cash flow may be necessary.

But remember that the start-up phase of a business doesn’t last forever.  In the beginning, unless you’ve got lots of money which most of us do not, every aspect of creating, producing, and marketing your business will be on your shoulders.  This can be very hard to sustain long-term without feeling the effects both physically and mentally.  For this very reason, it is important that you work as hard as possible to get out of the “start-up” phase as soon as possible.  The faster you grow your company doing your own work, the quicker you’ll have more hands and resources to help take on some of it.  You need to get to the point where you can hire people to do the jobs you don’t have to do and transition into an entrepreneur who works on his business rather than constantly working in it.

There will be times when you feel lost and need advice.  There will be times when you don’t know how to make a particular decision. When these days happen, and they will, take a deep breath, step back, and ask for that advice.  Though running a business isn’t always easy, it’s not all that complicated either.  On those days when you feel overwhelmed, remember that any kind of business is basically the process of selling something to someone else.  Good advice and answers to questions are always available from many sources.  But you need to be able to sift out the gold dust from the sand and finally figure it out yourself.

To avoid failure as an option, you need to check and stay on top of each and every area of your business regularly.  If you’ve always had the mantra “don’t sweat the small stuff”, change it now.  Always sweat the small stuff before it becomes a giant snowball that will roll over you.

There will be moments when you have the feeling of “wow, I’m really doing it!” as well as times when you fall down and think you can’t get back up.  But it’s your choice.

The choice is either accepting the lifestyle of an entrepreneur and all the pitfalls as well as successes that go along with it or find another 9 to 5 job where your labor will be benefiting someone else.Instead of looking for sympathy, figure out how to get it back on track.  Remind yourself of why you became an entrepreneur in the first place.

Always remember that it’s not how you fall that makes a difference.  It’s how fast you get back up.