The Top 10 Things You Should Know Before Deciding To Become Entrepreneur
Becoming an entrepreneur is a lot more different than becoming a salaryman or doing civil works. When you become an entrepreneur you will have a lot of freedom as well as responsibility.
Unlike an employee or salaryman, you have full control over your time and when you do your business as well as have freedom over the kinds of products or services you are going to sell.
You will also probably have employees you manage. From all of these benefits, becoming an entrepreneur is also having risks such as failure to handle your business or having loneliness and relationship problems.
Here are the top ten lists of things you should consider before you decide to plunge into entrepreneurship life.
1. What things you want to sacrifice in the process?
Entrepreneurship is cool and if you can be successful doing it you will get a lot of profits and recognition. But before you drive into your all-things-good expectation you need to pay attention to the things you may often fail to notice.
What things are you willing to sacrifice for the time being? Are you ready to give up your time, money, and energy to reach your target?
The entrepreneurship route is not as smooth as it looks and you need to prepare for this long journey by giving your idea and resources into it.
2. Can you persevere when things get tough?
If you are an employee your bosses or managers will give you motivation as well as rewards if you are good at your job, but you will not find this kind of treatment if you decide to become an entrepreneur.
You are on your own and your business depends solely on you. Perseverance is important in entrepreneurship. It is the ability to persist when things get difficult.
Perseverance alone will not make you successful but without it, your business will not going anywhere. You have to decide for yourself if you are capable to work even if no one encourages you to do so.
3. What are my plans for retirement?
Before you try to plunge yourself into entrepreneurship and start a business it is should be in your consideration to have a savings plan. Entrepreneurship business is not always stable and there are times when a business can fail.
To protect your future retirement you should start investing even if your business is under pressure. You have to prepare yourself for the rainy day.
4. How about the uncertainty?
When you become an entrepreneur you will not have the same repetitive activities just like being an employee.
You will have various tasks and jobs to do. What you do in three months after starting a business may be different from what you will do next year.
If you want certainty and know what you will do every day then an employee job is better suited for you, but if you choose to be an entrepreneur get prepared to be comfortable when dealing with uncertainty.
5. Do you like doing what you are doing?
This question is crucial in deciding if entrepreneurship is best for you. If you love what you do then you can conquer all the adversity in your business life.
If you have passion and love for what you do then you have the strength to carry on in pushing your business to strive. If you don’t like or have no passion then it only makes it harder for you to continue when difficulties arise.
6. Do you have courage to accept rejection
If you choose your way to becoming an entrepreneur you will have to deal with a lot of rejection. Your products or services will get rejected by customers, your customers will frequently turn you down and you will deal with competition from other business rivals.
Are you okay with all of those? It is important to have thick skin and you also have to accept the fact that constant rejection will always be there in the entrepreneurship business.
7. Is this a business or just a hobby?
There are differences between doing a job as a hobby or for serious business. If you merely doing it just for sustaining your hobby then you are going to lost motivation to keep going if you don’t feel like doing it anymore.
If you are going to do your job as a business then you will have no choice but to keep striving. Ask yourself this question: is my business marketable and possible to finance.
A lot of people when they start doing entrepreneur businesses they don’t like to deal with the required budget to keep sustaining the business. Being passionate is fine but you have to mind the required expenses and resources to keep the ship afloat.
8. Do you know your target customers?
There is a saying which goes like this, “Know your audience and work with passion”. It is a big mistake for an entrepreneur to have a business going without deciding the target audiences for their products and services beforehand.
It will only make it impossible to market your products or services. The more you analyze the best demographics for your business, the more sales you can profit from it.
9. What mistakes from others have you learned?
We are humans and humans do make mistakes. Mistakes are a great opportunity to evaluate your business so you can decide which plans are good and which ones are bad, but we don’t need to make a lot of mistakes to learn how to do your business in the right way.
You simply need to learn from other entrepreneurs’ mistakes. There are many start-up businesses that have gone bankrupt so your job is to learn what made them fail.
By learning from the failed businesses you can learn and take preventative measures for your business to avoid having a failure business. By learning from others’ experiences you can save yourself a lot of energy, time, and budget.
10. What if I cannot build a successful business in short time?
Forget about being rich in a short time from your start-up business. It will take a lot of trials and errors and you will also feel like giving up at some point in your entrepreneurship life.
The point is your business will never get success overnight. You have to keep this in mind when starting to become an entrepreneur.