The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Imagine your journey with me now. After realizing you need to make some changes, you simply close your eyes and get started. Start a business part-time, struggle to get it off the ground. You may fail many times. You will get rejected. You will get discouraged. But you must get up again. Lick your wounded ego. Move on. Eventually, you will be able to grow your business full-time. The DREAM is still alive. I hope you find the courage within you to pursue your dreams as well. There’s help on the other side when you decide to make a change in your life.
Cheers to your success!!!
There is ONE THING every aspiring entrepreneur needs to learn first before considering starting his or her own business.
A lot of times, people think that having money or capital is the most important thing you need to start your own business. If you ask an employee what he is going to do after retirement, a lot of the time he will answer, “go into business.” Why? Because they think that’s the only time he will have saved enough capital to put up a business. Some even rely on their retirement pay to start building their business. If you ask me, I think that’s the riskiest thing you can do at that stage in your life. What will you do if you fail? Will you still be able to get another job? Of course not! Someone younger, faster, cheaper would have replaced your skills by then.
They say, 9 out of 10 businesses fail in the first 5 years. Out of those which remained, 9 out of 10 of them will be out of business after 10 years. Why then do most businesses fail? Is it lack of capital? Yes, possibly. But there’s more to it than having capital. You see, a business has to have a proven and tested system. There are growing pains to setting up a business. That’s why FRANCHISES were invented. Banks lend you money if you put up an established franchise like McDonalds or Jollibee. Of course, you would have to satisfy certain requirements by the bank. Having a system is important, but you can leverage on an existing and proven system instead of creating your own.
There’s something even more important than having capital and a system when it comes to starting a business. You have to master this skill, otherwise, having more money can become your worst nightmare. Have you ever heard of lotto millionaires who, when they won the lottery became instant multi-millionaires, only to lose it all only after a few months or years. Some of them end up even more in debt than before they won the lottery. Do you know anyone who bought a successful franchise, then with his inexperience mismanage the business and end up getting bankrupt? Then when the business is sold to a businessman who knows what he’s doing, suddenly, the same business that was failing climbs to profitability.
The one thing you need to know before you start your own business is to LEARN FINANCIAL LITERACY. You need to know how to handle your own money. If you are in debt or don’t have any savings, I would definitely recommend you to start developing the habits of handling your money well first. Why? Because you may end up getting into BIGGER debts if you don’t know what you’re doing.
They say, money is neither good nor bad. It simply magnifies what you are. This means, if you can’t handle your little money, most probably, having more money will not help you. It might even ruin your life. Money is a HUGE magnifier. It magnifies who you are as a business person. If you are kind when you didn’t have money. More money will allow you to be kind to more people.
Contrary to what most people think, it takes a lot of upfront effort, money, time and resources to get a business off the ground to take it to a level where it makes enough money for you to live on. The reason a lot of businesses fail is because they are short of cash. Why? Because the business owner doesn’t know how to manage the cash flow. Everything is going out, nothing is coming in. They don’t even know where their money is going in the first place.
If you have been living like an employee for most of your life, realize that you’ve been “conditioned” to feel safe when you receive your monthly paycheck. In most cases this happens twice a month on the 15th and on the 30th. It takes a lot of effort and years of mind reprogramming to reverse that conditioning. So if you feel you are at this stage, know that it will take some time to shift your mindset from an employee to that of a business owner.
There are times when desperation gets the better of you and the emotions of GREED and FEAR starts to kick in. FEAR of not being able to pay your bills. FEAR of not having money to pay for your family’s needs. Those are real fears. GREED comes into play when you want SOMETHING for NOTHING. Some people ask, “will I still be able to earn in business even without doing anything?” Sometimes, I want to answer back, “can you try not showing up to your work for months and expect to get paid a monthly salary?” Unless you’re on maternity leave or the son of the owner, more often than not, the answer to that question is simply NO. It’s when I hear these types of questions that I realize the person is not ready to get into business. Unfortunately, the same people are most vulnerable to GET-RICH-QUICK-SCHEMES. Why? Because that’s what get rich quick schemes give you, a promise to earn something without doing anything. But we all know promises are made to be broken, so a lot of the time, you end up having nothing.
Unfortunately, some people are just plain lazy and stupid. They don’t want to learn. They blindly give their money, hoping that it will grow when someone else will handle it for them. Unfortunately, “hope” is not a good business strategy. Hoping that one day your financial life will change while doing the same thing over and over again, according to Albert Einstein, is simply called INSANITY.
The thing that worries me sometimes is when people having a tough time financially, become too close to the problem that they fail to see the bigger picture. For example, someone without any business skill gets started in business and gets excited of the thought that his financial worries will soon go away. Two things can happen. One, due to sheer strength of will, hard work, determination and tenacity, he learns everything he needs to learn in mindset and skills from books, seminars or a mentor, and after some time he eventually earns enough to get his business off the ground and succeed. The other thing that can happen is, he fails to learn and listen, insisting on his own ideas, never willing to learn anything new, never wanting to listen from someone who has been to where he wants to go, and listening to people who failed in business, soon he ends up failing miserably and eventually quitting after the first sign of discouragement. He ends up blaming everything except himself. He becomes cynical, not realizing that shifting from employment to business is different from jumping from job to job. There’s a whole wide world of difference.
Becoming an entrepreneur is a lot like riding a bike. On your first try, you will most probably fail. A lot. Then you get back up. You try again. You fail. Try again. Then finally you didn’t realize you already developed the skills enough to get you to an amateur level. If you want to compete and decide to become a professional, you may need to put in more time and money to study and master it. That’s what PROFESSIONALS do. That’s what Olympians and world-class athletes do. Remember, people pay top dollar for top value. If you bring in lots of value, people will gladly pay you for it. But if you turn in mediocre performance, the market will make sure you get the necessary feedback. You’ll fail.
One of the hardest things you will learn in building your business is this. Your results reveal the value you are creating in the market place. Numbers don’t lie. It may hurt your ego to be earning less than what you deserve, but the reality is VALUE is non-transferrable. You may be highly valuable to your job, but in business you need to create value into that particular business before you earn what you deserve.
That’s why I recommend you continue working on your job, but start to build a part-time business on the side. Having a steady flow of cash from your full-time job, will help you whether through the storm. At the same time, you can learn the necessary skills and mindset needed in order to shift your career from employment to business at your own pace. There’s a learning curve to everything. You have to learn how to think differently. Think like an entrepreneur. You have to learn the skills of marketing, sales and management. You need to learn how to manage your money, your time and your other resources to make your business work. You also need to learn how to work with people, how to lead a team and more.
The good news is, as you start earning from your part-time business, you will have developed an additional stream of income for you and your family. As I would always say, it’s better to add additional income than to remove one. Once your side business gets going, it will allow you the flexibility to learn the ropes without worrying about what to eat. When the time comes that your part-time “thing” matches the income from your full-time job, you will have the option to quit your daytime job or stay where you are. Jim Rohn said, “wages make you a living, profits make you a fortune”. Once your business takes off, you can end up surprising even yourself and make yourself a fortune.
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