Yesterday I’ve come across Monika Mundell’s 9 Things That Could Ruin Your Entrepreneur Spirit and I couldn’t resist commenting a little bit on the items. If you remember my older post There is something wrong with entrepreneur’s minds – entrepreneurs are able to postpone the accomplishment of their dreams, or even act against them for the final purpose. So it seems that before getting more time, more money and being your own boss, you have to pass through a time where you don’t get time at all, all the money are invested and every customer is your boss.
Anyway, getting back to the Monika’s article, I will copy the “things” here so I can comment them.
- Uncertainty
Entrepreneurship is uncertain business. When you become self employed you don’t know whether your business will take off or not. But if we never try, how do we ever know? This could especially be a problem in the beginning stages. In a young business it is hard to tell whether our ideas will eventually work out.
Correct. Actually I think that if you are an entrepreneur, and even if your business does well, you will always have a degree of uncertainty until the exit day when you can really say it was successful or not. If you are a start-up, chances are that you think that having the first 100k in the bank makes you certain your business is doing great. Until next morning when your competition makes a move and gets your market share. Or until oil prices go up and your fleet is more expensive to run.
- Risk of failure
Most of us are afraid of things, situations or even people. Being in business for yourself won’t change this. Especially when our own capital is involved we tend to get very scared.
I have plenty of articles dealing with entrepreneurship fear of failure. As I actually wrote in this article yesterday, “having previous entrepreneurship experience doesn’t make starting up a new business easier. It actually makes it harder. Not only that you know what went wrong with the previous one, but this time you also have something else to loose that can make you more cautious: money and pride. And if you had a great idea once, it’s really so hard getting a new one that is as good as the last one.”
- Hard work
If somebody ever told you that being an entrepreneur is easy, they were lying. It isn’t easy. What is easy anyway. Picking your nose perhaps. If you want to step into your own entrepreneurial shoes you need to understand that there is hard work involved. Not necessarily hard as in physical, but mental and tiring.
I’ve already wrote that entrepreneurship is hard work. The bad news is that no matter how many employees you have to work for you, entrepreneurship is hard – you can see the reasons in my article – damn, I’m smart 
- Long hours
As an entrepreneur myself I work long hours. While some might say; what is the purpose of slaving away from home with the worries about business, if you can work for a boss instead and do half the work, I understand.
Working for yourself means is very hard to draw a line where the workday ends. And even if you get home to your family, an entrepreneurs have a terrible bad time disconnecting from the issues and challenges their business has. It’s almost like an obsession. And being on top of the food-chain means you are the final link in the problem solving process. I mean every problem that doesn’t have a solution – guess what – makes it to you.
- Irregular income
As long as you are prepared and put some pennies aside for the slower times you should be fine. Problems start when entrepreneurs burn all their money, thinking it will just keep flowing. While the thought is one I rather like, nature has shown us that it won’t always work that way.
I’ve said it before. You might not realise before starting up, but getting a $300 raise is far more easy if you are an employee than having to build your business to get $300 more. Funny, isn’t that? And you thought entrepreneurs should have more money than you, the 9 to 5 worker, because they “keep all the profits for themselves”. Wrong. I have an article somewhere about this. Can’t find it right now.
- No benefits
But we don’t get sick pay, holiday pay or even 401k benefits. Life insurance is also another topic to consider, as well as work cover if that exists within your country. Basically any benefits we take for granted as an employee will fall away when we go into business for ourselves.
Yah. You should read this: entrepreneurs can’t quit.
- Marketing
One problem is that hardly anybody is a born marketer. That means we all have to learn and adapt to our industry as an ongoing learning experience. We can’t afford to rest and have to keep our eyes on the ball to stay competitive and in the game.
Hmmm. Don’t know about that, why should be a problem. I’m a marketing professional, probably that’s why.
- Lack of quality time
Ok, this is a biggie. If you have family, pets or friends that are used to seeing you around on birthdays, Xmas and other common holidays, then you might be in for a shock. Sometimes in business we have to keep working when the world parties.
Time? What’s that? I think this is put lightly. Think about weekend work. Think about holiday work. You wouldn’t do that for your employer? Entrepreneurs do that, hoping that sometimes will pay back. And there is no saying if it will ever do.
- Missing funds
Depending on the business you seek to run you will need some major funds (even if you start small). Sometimes those funds are simply not available to us and that could be the first major hurdle to face as a budding entrepreneur.
Well, if at your 9 to 5 work you are probably talking about budget (having or not having budget for something), start-up entrepreneurs talk about having enough money in the bank to pay the bills at the end of the month, or pay the wages.
You might want to read Monika Mundell’s original article, so here it is: 9 Things That Could Ruin Your Entrepreneur Spirit
