What does it takes to be an entrepreneur and start your own business?

Transcript

Hi, Lucas Walker here, the Small Business Consultant who gets big results.

What It Takes To Be An Entrepreneur

Today I’m going to talk about what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

As things keep changing in the world a lot of people are trying to make the decision of should I leave the quiet, safety of a nine to five, jobby-job and move off on my own?

Should I create a side hustle?

Should I try to take that path?

There are a lot of myths. There’s a lot of fear around that.

And so the goal of this series is to kind of break down some of these various elements.

The first thing I want to cover before I get into my list of key elements of entrepreneurship, is that if you’re thinking about entrepreneurship as a get rich, quick scheme, do not start entrepreneurship.

That is probably the worst reason to ever try. It is not a shortcut. It is a long cut. It’s proven to work but it is a long cut. You’re going to work way harder for way less money being an entrepreneur than you are within some other organization, just period the end.

We’ll talk more about that why later. But if that is your goal, I would suggest you just keep trying to hop up the corporate ladder in different positions. That’s where you’re getting the best time for money return.

Now if you’d like to

  • be more in control of your destiny,
  • if you’d like to have some feeling of creativity,
  • that you’re making something from scratch,
  • that you’re building something

then entrepreneurship is probably a good idea for you!

So I have a list put together here of some of the things that are non negotiables.

1.) Be a hard worker.

I’ll talk more about this in detail in another video.

But the basic concept is when you’re an employee somewhere, you are paid for all of the work that you do. When you start your own business there are billable hours and unbillable hours.

So if you think about it as like a power meter, certain work you do for a client you actually get paid for that ends up being a very small sliver.

When you first start, you might have to go to hours and hours of networking events, coffee meetings, appointments, cold calls, working on website where you’re actually paid absolutely nothing just to get your first client who maybe gives you $50, $100, $200.

So you’re unbillable hours to billable hours is way out of whack.

As you get better at business this can improve, but it takes a long time to start to fix that.

That means that even though maybe your current employer is paying you $30 an hour for a certain type of labor, and you are charging the customer $100 an hour it may not be as profitable as you think.

When you have your own business if you charge even more than you are making (way more than you used to make before!) it might have taken you 10 hours to sell that one hour of work. So you actually ended up making like $8 an hour, not the $100 that you thought you’d be making.

So being a hard worker is non negotiable.

If your work is only motivated by money, you will burn out you will quit so being a hard worker is number one.

2.) Focus On Quality

The reason being is if you’re just trying to get into the scene to make money or to do something easy, you have no competitive edge.

The main way you can compete is by creating a better quality outcome or value than anybody else. That means that you have to be constantly learning. It helps to be a top of your field when you first start.

Be constantly learning and adapting and focusing on that quality.

You’re in trouble the instant that you abandoned quality for scalability – when you stop worrying about the quality of each interaction, just to focus on getting big.

Because whenever you do that, you just kind of blend into the marketplace.

If you’re focused on quality, then the actual value you’re giving people is much higher than what they’re paying for.

And that difference is what allows them to refer other people to you to be repeat users of your product and come around again and again.

Whenever we stop focusing on quality, now they’re paying for the quality of the good that they’re getting pretty much that same or lesser.

So the chances of them looping back around again are really small.

That means that you might sell them one time on what you have, but they won’t become a repeat customer or I would forget.

So quality is a non negotiable if you’re trying to cut corners or that is your typical M.O. This is not for you.

So being a hard worker is one focusing on quality is number two.

3.) Adaptability and Patience

So a lot of people think that they can sit in their arm chair and think really smart thoughts about business. They can sit there and have this business idea and then it’s just going to happen the way they envisioned it.

They think everyone that went on Shark Tank has sat down with a napkin, sketch out an idea and they go on and they get millions of dollars.

A truly successful business typically begins with a fearlessness in approaching something that we know is not a finished product.

It’s kind of heading down a path and now this patience if it took us a long time to get there.

But we’re noticing what are the deviations we have to make in that path? Where should we adapt?

So we kind of head in one direction and new information comes to light. We’ve shifted a little bit. We shift a little bit.

Think of it like a river running through the countryside or roots growing underground. They’re going to grow until they hit a rock and they’re going to adjust and move. That’s the way of nature. That’s the way of life. Very rarely is there a straight line, nonstop direction forward.

And in business I would say I have seen zero times someone sit down, think of a plan and then execute it (it all goes according to plan.)

It just doesn’t happen.

Instead, we head in a direction. We have to adapt

Let’s say to be a hard worker focus on quality, have patience and adaptability so that you’re ready to adjust to keep tuning things and the other really big important part is organization.

4.) Organization

So sometimes entrepreneurs are so much into the elements of hard work that they don’t mind to grind and roll their sleeves up but they forget that you have to have some structure and some organization.

I talked a little bit about billable and unbillable hours earlier. This is really important because if you’re not organized, your unbillable hours can expand and expand which means that your capacity and your week if you want to work let’s say 60 or 70 hours in a week, if 30 of those are used for unbillable hours you only to get 30 or 40 to actually bill for. If you can cut your unbillable time down by being more organized. It can actually increase your billable time or it can just have you working a 40 hour week still billing for 30 hours!

So Organization is key.

How to Organize becomes a skill you learn over time.

Most of these that I’ve gone over so far are things that maybe you have a personality trait that would allow for that, but you’re not gonna know exactly how to do it until you’re heading down the path of entrepreneurship.

Another important part of the organization is doing some basic math before you dive all the way into a business. I have other content on this that helps you break down the math of your business.

But you don’t have to work really hard for four years to find out your idea doesn’t work. You can actually do it on pen and paper algebra say “what do I plan on charging for my my product?” “What are my expected business expenses?” “How much do I have to take home?”

Based on those facts: “How many of my product do I have to sell per month to pay my bills?”

And then you can look at that number and say Is that reasonable or not reasonable?

If it’s not, what are the variables I can change?

Like I don’t need a giant warehouse. Maybe I can work out of my own house, maybe my price point has to be much higher, which means my value has to be much higher. All those pieces can be moved around.

But as you’re in the business doing and working and grinding away, it’s really hard to make those changes. So it’s much easier if you kind of sit down up front and have a general map that you know you’re gonna adjust over time as you begin.

So being a hard worker is non negotiable, patience and adaptability is non negotiable, quality is non negotiable, and a level of organization is non negotiable.

The final major things is self care.

5.) Self Care

So in my experience, the number one reason a business fails is because the owner gets too tired and too burned out.

As long as you still have energy, you can adapt, you can change, you can find a way you can make it happen. You can grind and do it.

Once you’re exhausted, too exhausted to try new things your business is going to fail for sure.

So that self care piece is really important.

It’s kind of a balance early on. There’s a stage early where you’re pretty much just drowning and you’d have to get your head above water making the cash flow to pay your bills are in kind of “grinding your face off” time.

Once you hit that level though, it’s important to find ways to scale back the needs of the business so that your personal needs are met more and more. And to look for ways to expand the business while maintaining that protection around yourself so you can keep on driving the business forward.

So this was just a little bit of an introduction to some of the core concepts around starting your own business.

Have any other questions?

Hit me up in the comments. I’ll put out some more video content over time to dive deeper into these ideas!