The Makings of a Great Entrepreneur
From a very young age this seed is within us all. What we choose to do with it or not is up to us. Our upbringing plays a large part on our mindset around creating income. For some it is the first thought in their head. They have family and friends around who cheer them on and help build the path to being an entrepreneur. Starting out selling lemonade, shoveling driveways, or any other things we can think of is often encouraged when we are children. But for some reason the closer one gets to adulthood the once encouraging people in our life can start to sound more like naysayers. Perhaps it is out of worry, they don’t want to see you waste your money, resources and time. The path of going to college and the ‘security’ of a job with good benefits can seem practical and safe. Or perhaps it is out of jealousy; their once bright dreams got lost along the way and seeing another person strive for theirs is a painful reminder. Entrepreneurship means many things to many people. Freedom, control, peace, creativity, excitement and choices. Typically it is the exact opposite of a job. Even at the greatest job in the world, it will never be as fulfilling as something you are in charge of designing and molding to your vision.
What makes a great entrepreneur? What determines if they will succeed or fail? How do they know if a decision is a good one or a bad one. As vast as the industries are, there are many constants across them all. If you run a one man show than some of this won’t apply, but the bigger the business grows the more important it is to pay attention to. What makes a great entrepreneur? Knowing that you are not going to be the best fit for every task. This is a good thing. We all come into our business with set strengths, that is typically why we get started in the first place. We like to cook so we open a restaurant, we enjoy working on cars so we open a mechanic shop, we like helping people with their health so we become a doctor. Our strengths is the most common place to start, but if we aren’t careful we start to feel like we have to make every area of business our strengths. Bookkeeping, working with customers, ordering inventory, marketing, payroll, the list can go on forever.
If we don’t build our business strategically things start to suffer. First it’s our business growth. We can’t get to all the to-do lists efficiently so things are delayed costing us precious income opportunities, paying bills on time, keeping things in stock, etc. Our stress load increases and then our employees and customers pay the price. When starting a business many times we start alone. No employees, just us and possibly our spouse. We are forced to do all the tasks. During this period there is a lot of growth, lots of discovery of what works, what resources and tools to use that make our business run smoother. While in this phase, keep note of what tasks you enjoy and what tasks you dread. As you grow your business you want to hire based on the jobs and tasks that you don’t enjoy and don’t need to oversee solely. By hiring to fill these positions instead of just the obvious entry level jobs we can keep our time going towards the things that we can’t hand off or that we don’t want to hand off. Making the job description of a new hire custom to our needs and industry instead of maybe what would normally fall in that role, can help cross train our employees to take on more and be more well-rounded of an asset in their career and in our business.
Hiring people who think and see differently than us, also is necessary. Many husband-and-wife business owners see this up close and personal. If they are wise they approach it with humor, keeping the differences in the proper light of helping one another. Whereas one spouse makes decisions slowly, using logic and data to back up each decision, the other spouse may go off of their gut. They can see opportunities in the early phase and be ready to jump on board seeing the big picture unfold with lots of possibilities. Having a partner, manager, or team that thinks differently can help us to not get stuck in our one-sided perspective, jumping into bad situations or missing out on great opportunities because we didn’t let others fill in our gaps. Making smart decisions as we grow our business happens by having constant input of new ideas, growth and mentorship. We got to where we are with what we have, to get to higher mountains we have to keep personal growth at the center of our journey. If we feel like we have arrived, then it is time to set some bigger goals.