Have you ever found yourself dreading Monday morning? Do you daydream at your desk about being your own boss? Is there an idea or a burgeoning business venture that you’d just love to develop, if only you had the time, money and believed in yourself? If so, I’m here to tell you to stop dreaming and start acting on those latent entrepreneurial urges.
So where do you start? It’s impossible to offer a one-size-fits-all guide to going self-employed but answering these three key questions can help get anyone started on the road to running your own business.
1. Do you have what it takes?
The first step to becoming a successful entrepreneur involves weighing up whether you have what it takes to run your own business. This means making a painfully honest assessment of yourself. A word of caution: there is no point faking the answer to this question. If you don’t have the kind of self-motivation needed, you are only going to set yourself up for disaster further down the line.
Someone once told me that successful business people display these common traits: a strong positive motivation for starting the business, key entrepreneurial characteristics such as determination and perseverance, key personal skills such as the ability to plan and problem solve and the business knowledge and acumen to make their idea work. Successful business people also make effective use of their resources, contacts and networks of support.
It’s important to remember that entrepreneurs are made, not born. While some people do just naturally possess entrepreneurial skills and characteristics by the bucket load, others must acquire them — and many do. (Which is a nice way of saying that if you haven’t got what it takes you are not ruled out of the game but you have your work cut out for you.)
Running a business is an ongoing process of learning and reflection. I once worked for a thirty-something entrepreneur who ran not one but two very successful businesses. More than anyone else for whom I’ve worked, this guy encouraged — almost provoked me — to step out of my comfort zone and reach for new challenges and opportunities within my work.
He effectively promoted me to a role to which I was ill-experienced and while he made it clear that he was taking a chance on me, he also encouraged me to make his faith in me worthwhile. When I confessed to feeling somewhat out of my depth and inadequate, he laughed as he let me into the only business secret I’ve ever really needed to know: Everyone feels this way, or at least has done at some stage in their career. Everyone! Even the senior colleague who dresses well and shines at what she does? She feels it, too.
The key is to keep a little dose of that self-doubt tucked in your pocket, just enough to keep you grounded. It becomes a case of feel and understand the fear and do it anyway.
A Global Entrepreneur Monitor report in 2003 found that one third of the female population let the fear of failure stop them from starting a business?
And let’s be real, businesses do fail, sometimes at a great personal cost. But there are simple safe guards, which can help you to create a stable, profitable business and by following them you stand a strong chance of success. And if the worse does happen, you’ll be one of the brave few who have the satisfaction of knowing you felt the fear and did it anyway. That has to feel better than regret at never having taken the risk, or a life-long case of the what-might-have-beens.
So look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself the important questions. Have I got what it takes? And why do I want to run my own business?
If it’s so that no one will give you grief when you’re late for work, the chances are your motivation for going self-employed is a little askew. Sure, there are benefits to being your own boss, but there are a lot of additional challenges and pressures that come with self-employment, too. It can also help to list out the pros and cons of going self-employed and then weigh them up against each other carefully.
2. Got a viable business idea?
If you decide you’ve got what it takes, the next step is to work out whether your business idea has legs. A great idea is not necessarily a great business. This is where writing a business plan comes into play. But before you even put pen to paper, you need to engage in some thorough market research. The goal is to establish whether there’s a market for your idea and to make sure it hasn’t already been done.
You want to identify your customers and find out as much as you can. You need to understand who your competitors are and decide if you can get ahead of them by offering something unique that they can’t. In the early stages a business plan is less about “selling” your idea to potential investors and more about enabling yourself to scope out the idea as realistically as possible. It’s where the rubber hits the road.
It seems stupidly obvious, but remember that a business is essentially about selling a product or service. It’s vital that you know what you’re selling, for how much, to whom, and the how, when and why of it all.
3. Got the money?
You have to spend money to make money, or so the old saying goes. Unless you’re sitting on a goldmine, chances are you’re going to have to go into debt in order to go into business. In fact, it surprises me that would-be business owners are more afraid of failure than they are of the financial ramifications. It’s the money bit that scares me. However, good, well-researched business propositions, put together by people with the right skills, are likely to attract funding.
If there are specific characteristics of an entrepreneur, then good financial planning skills are the backbone of a successful business. Even when a business fails, the damage can be significantly reduced with good, pre-emptive financial planning. I’d never used an accounting spreadsheet in my life until a few months ago but now I can knock up a cash flow forecast in under an hour. The good news is you can learn good financial planning.
I’m a firm believer that going freelance or starting a small business is easier than we assume. Fear is a crippling factor but it’s not a good enough reason not to go for it. Make the most of the security of a steady income to plan ahead for the rougher terrain that being self-employed brings. To conclude, here are my top three tips for making it as a female entrepreneur:
As it says in the “Good Book”: Do Not Be Discouraged. I’ve learned first-hand that people will always rain on your parade. Sometimes people genuinely want to help you to avoid making costly mistakes, but sometimes people just don’t like seeing others succeed. Take any advice you are offered, always say a sincere thank you for it, but never let it divert you from the courage of your convictions.
Find a mentor if you can. People love being asked for advice and successful businessmen and women are usually only too happy to talk about their experiences. Why risk making your own mistakes when you can learn from other people?
Read; feed your inspiration, not your fear. There’s nothing like a business success story for stoking the coals of your own business dream. They say forewarned is forearmed, and a cautionary tale can be just as valuable in helping prevent you from making mistakes.
And just in case you think all this is easy for me to say, I’ll let you in on one more secret. My father used to run his own business. He thrived on the experience and enjoyed success, but in the end the business crashed and burned, and he came close to losing everything. It’s a sobering tale. It took my parents years to claw their way out of the debt they accrued in the process. True, he’s not rich beyond his wildest dreams, but somehow I suspect he learned and gained more from the experience than he ever would have, had the business “worked.” But, I’ll never think of him as anything other than an entrepreneurial success. I admire and respect him for the risks he took and the steps he made to rebuild himself and our family. Furthermore, I credit him with having inspired me to bang on the door of my own business, without being stymied by the fear of failure. If that’s what failing means, I only hope to fail myself one day.