Five Hard Things About Being An Entrepreneur
It’s great to be your own boss. It’s difficult to be your own boss. When you’re an entreprenuer you need to be willing to take the good with the bad.
Here are five hard things about being an entrepreneur that will get easier with time and experience.
- You are responsible for everything. As the boss you have no one to turn to if something goes awry other than yourself. You’re making the decisions. You are the person at the top and the buck stops with you. You will work long hours and will have to make sacrifices when you’re starting out — it comes with the territory of being solely responsible.
- Once you can hire staff or contractors, you will find it difficult to delegate. It’s been you running the show for so long it will be hard to give it to someone else to take over.
- Starting from scratch or buying into an existing business are vastly different. You need to decide which you’re more comfortable with and make that decision. Buying an existing business means there will likely be policies and procedures in place and if there is existing staff that may make for an easy transition. BUT if you want to come in and make changes, you will need to be prepared for push back and hearing “that’s not how we do it.”
- Being willing to take risks. IF you’re not a risk taker, it may be more difficult to run a business than you may have imagined. Keep in mind, “no risk. No reward.” You don’t want to make foolish risks, but you do need to be willing to try something new, experiment and see what happens. If it doesn’t work, start again and learn from your mistakes.
- Handling money. It is tempting when you’re just starting out to want to go big with your business. You want to rent office space. Invest in office furniture and go all in. That’s great, but I urge you to start out on a shoestrong and grow when the cash flow allows. You also need to build a team and on that team should be a financial advisor/bookkeeper/CPA. Don’t get on the wrong side of the IRS. Put good financial practices into place before you depost your first dollar.
What have you found to be the biggest challenge when you were starting out?