The first thing you have to do to launch
any successful enterprise is to get over the notion that it’s impossible.
This may fly in the face of good-intentioned friends and relatives, so if
you need the support of someone else to make you feel that you can
succeed, make sure you talk to someone who’s already done what you seek to
do.
First, Eliminate Your
Excuses
Then you have to eliminate
all the excuses for why you think a self-reliant lifestyle won’t work for
you. Here are probably the big three, but you may have a few of your
own to work through:
EXCUSE No. 1: I’d like to work for
myself, but all I know is [ fill in the blank ] obviously, you can’t do
that over the internet.
A lot of people were saying that five
years ago, but look how many businesses thrive in virtual space today.
Maybe you can’t paint someone’s house by sending them a download, but you
can advertise, take orders and schedule your jobs in your own time leaving
yourself free to perform the skill you do best. You don’t have to be
seeking a worldwide market. You’ll be amazed at how many of your
closest neighbors are wired to the world, even in the most rural
locations.
EXCUSE No. 2: I’m broke. We just
have enough to live from paycheck to paycheck.
None of us has enough money (and those
that do are often the stingiest in spending it). If all you have is
access to a computer and your good looks, you can still start your own
business. To make an extreme example, let’s say you’re a heavy
equipment operator. A new bulldozer may cost upward of $150,000 so
you can’t possibly start up as an excavation contractor, can you?
Well, yes, you can. You don’t need a new bulldozer to be an
excavation contractor, you need a client who will pay you more to do a
certain job than it will cost you to borrow, rent or make payments on the
equipment you need to do the job.
EXCUSE No. 3: I have the ambition
of a three-toed sloth. If it weren’t for the threat of complete
self-destruction at the end of each work week, I’d probably never get out
of bed at all.
Of the three, this is without question
the best excuse, because in order to build a business large enough to
replace your job, you will almost certainly spend more time working on it
than you did at your employment. If ambition is your problem than
probably this is not the direction for you. However, I think you’ll
find that working for yourself is much more rewarding and more interesting
than letting someone else call all the shots. You might just have it
in you after all.
If you’ve been an employee all your life,
then the most important parts of gaining self-employment may be relatively
unfamiliar to you, that is, decision-making.
More Fun, But a Lot of
Work
Success at being your own boss depends
very much on the basic decisions you make as you start up your start-up;
decisions, like, "what do you want to do in the first place?". Here,
you have to balance practicality with what stirs your soul, and I would
emphasis that it’s most important not to let either aspect have dominance.
In order to promote success, you need to
spend your time working in a field that you find interesting, challenging
and fun. If you don’t really enjoy what you’re doing, then you may as
well stay on the job you have now. On the other hand, you can’t ignore
the fact that the path is littered with the dead corpses of young start-up
companies dedicated to the owner’s favorite hobby.
Maybe you love canoeing, but that doesn’t
mean that you’ll love manufacturing canoes, or that you’d enjoy running a
guide service, or thrill over publishing maps of rivers. Maybe you’d be
better off concentrating on a completely different field, and letting your
hobby remain your hobby.
One thing is certain though, if your
hobby is the basis of your new business, you need to make sure that the
business end takes precedence over the hobby. To oversimplify, if you
make doughnuts, you need to be sure you don’t eat up all the profits; if
you want to move from being a coin collector to being a coin dealer, you
need to be able to purchase items that will sell, not the ones you want to
own the most.
