How To Make Entrepreneurship Work For You
This is box title“Entrepreneurship is fun, exciting, rewarding, and it leaves you with that real feeling of achievement.”
Draining and exhausting it might be, but entrepreneurs are achievers. They surmount practical business problems and also some soul sucking issues. Entrepreneurship is fun, exciting, rewarding, and it leaves you with that real feeling of achievement.
Going into entrepreneurship with open eyes, and a strong reality of what is to come, like those that Jason Baptiste of OnStartups points out, can help you through the journey.
[Tweet “3 ways to make #entrepreneurship work for you! #shareyourjourney #business”]Here are a few ways you can make entrepreneurship work for you:
Work with Uncertainty
Follow Tom Hopkin’s rule of prospecting 10 clients/customers per week. Do all that you have to.
With activity and numbers on your side, you’ll land a few projects or make a few sales each month. If you’ve been in business, you’ll realize that “ a few” is as good as none. You never know what’s hitting you next month. Plus, there are all sorts of external factors that can affect your business. It’s important to build a mindset to handle uncertainty. But then, you aren’t new to uncertainty. Everything in our life has uncertainty built into it.
Do you what you do best: manage risk and outcome.
Prepare to Pivot
Nothing lasts forever, not even your passionate idea and the heart-wrenching work, dedication, and emotional investment you poured into your entrepreneurial journey.
Sometimes you’re entrepreneurial journey will lead you to a dead end or a fork in the road. It’s these times that you need to consider pivoting – or changing the initial direction you set out on. Not sure what I mean? Check out this scene from HBO’s hit series, Silicon Valley. It explains what it means to ‘pivot’ – I just don’t suggest you go about gathering information on new direction the way they do!
Stop looking for appreciation
We are humans. We thrive on appreciation, feeling good, and being applauded. We like attention. We are hardcore attention-seekers, most of us. Even the most humble people in the world need a pat on the back: they are humble, but they aren’t machines.
In business, you come up with a great idea, produce world-class products, and you’ll have customers for life. Yet, you’ll face resistance. A decision you take could draw flak on media, or worse, with your customers. Look at Adobe and it’s Creative Cloud – there was an actual campaign doing the rounds criticizing Adobe’s subscription model.
Consider Adobe’s situation above: If I were on Adobe’s top chair, I’d care less. More than 1/4th of the world’s population is “outside” of U.S and U.K. While these markets can argue to death on Subscription Model Vs. Buying Software bundles, the rest of the world couldn’t afford Adobe’s bundled products. So, Adobe’s cloud proposition worked. Adobe knows what its doing. Take the cue. Do what you believe in. Let the lemurs make all the noises they way.
How do you find entrepreneurship as a journey? What stories do you have to share with us?