The Entrepreneurial Journey

Navigating a Successful Path for Your Business, Family, and Future

John J. Waldron

• Publisher: River Grove Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781632992505
• eBook ISBN: 9781632992512
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

A Balanced Approach

Emotional awareness is critical for entrepreneurs throughout every stage of the business life cycle. As their businesses begin and then mature, entrepreneurs face increasingly complex emotional challenges that they must navigate as they take their businesses from an idea to the maturation period of growth and expansion, to succession planning and divestiture, to the day they step aside.

John Waldron has leveraged his own entrepreneurial experience and that of the hundreds of business owners he has counseled to build an essential framework that addresses the important balance between the tangible and intangible complexities of each stage of The Entrepreneurial Journey.

To achieve the greatest level of success, you have to balance the technical with the emotional. The Entrepreneurial Journey will help potential entrepreneurs navigate both, so so that they may bring their businesses to their full potential.

PHASE ONE

Survival

CHAPTER ONE

Cash, Debt, and Drive

Stakeholders:

You

Your spouse

Your children (the next generation is an evolving and complex group of stakeholders)

Your partners (silent or otherwise)

The bank

Emotions:

Excitement

Fear

Doubt

Anxiety

Euphoria

Motivation/drive

Trust

Symptoms:

Frequent sleepless nights

Survival instinct drives you

An uneasy feeling from operating outside your comfort zone

Emergence of skills you didn’t even know you had

Small wins feel like enormous validations of your vision

Motivation to prove your doubters wrong

In some circumstances, risk feels like more than you can bear

In other circumstances, risk generates an adrenaline rush

There Are Many Paths to Entrepreneurship

WHETHER YOU’RE JUST STARTING out in business or you’re well on your way through its Lifecycle, you probably have some pretty strong feelings about the early days. When I look back, I remember quite a bit of stress following my decision to set out on my own. On the one hand, there was the excitement and conviction. Part of me just knew that this venture was going to work. But on the other hand, there was uncertainty, insecurity, and doubt. After all, like many entrepreneurs just starting out, during the Survival Phase, it was only me. Apart from my wife, Maureen, I didn’t have anyone else to help me overcome the obstacles, so I had to constantly battle with uncertainty during all the early challenges and failures. I did a lot of talking to myself and to Maureen.

Everybody comes to entrepreneurship differently. Some people are born with the drive and freedom to take this kind of leap—and anyway, they couldn’t imagine ever having to work for somebody else. They might not have always known what they were going to do, but they have always known that one day they would build something on their own.

Then there are the people who join their family business when it has already reached one of the middle phases of the Lifecycle. Many of them have grown up around this business and have always assumed it would be their role to lead it one day. They may or may not be natural-born entrepreneurs, but they have certainly grown up knowing that one day they would become an entrepreneur.

Finally, there is the longer, more circuitous road to entrepreneurship, where a person tries different careers, learns different skills, spots an opportunity, and then finds their way to that entrepreneurial path. For most people in this camp, a singular event or moment triggers this change in their mindset. One day, they’re a career person. Then they encounter an opportunity, and suddenly they’re an entrepreneur.

For one client of mine, that opportunity came when he found himself entangled in union politics. Dan is a charismatic, natural-born leader. As a young man, he was popular among the rank and file union workers in his city. This popularity threatened the union president so much that he had Dan blackballed from any job within a hundred miles. This made life very hard for Dan, a young husband and father of three. One night, following a contentious meeting at his union hall, Dan found himself in an elevator with three large gentlemen who disagreed with his point of view. Back in the early ’70s, union tensions were high—high enough that these three large gentlemen forced the elevator to stop and then tried to beat Dan’s opinion out of him. They hadn’t counted on their opponent being a tenacious former Marine. After the encounter, Dan restarted the elevator, reached the ground floor, stepped over his three opponents, and exited the elevator.

During the brawl, he lost a couple of teeth that he didn’t find until the next morning after two cups of coffee (or as he puts it, those teeth really came back to “bite me in the ass”). More importantly, that encounter on the elevator convinced Dan that the time had come to leave the union for a safer job running his own equipment rental business. Hopefully your own wake-up call, if you’ve had one, wasn’t as painful. And hopefully you will meet with every bit as much success as Dan, who went on to grow that company over a period of forty years before selling it for over $300 million.

Another client happened upon an entrepreneurial opportunity when a good friend of his died in a surfing accident. The friend had started developing technology that his estate didn’t know what to do with, so my client offered to buy the rights to implement this technology. He already owned another business, but he decided that the time was right to become a serial entrepreneur (more on this topic later), and boom, he started another business and hit the ground running.

Each of these entrepreneurs achieved their success in part because of their willingness to take risks. The more risk you take, the higher the potential for success (or failure). You get outside your comfort zone, and then you work harder and dig deeper than you ever thought possible. Hopefully, in the end, you succeed.

If you’re in the Survival Phase, chances are you have found your opportunity and you are skilled in ways that will help you meet that opportunity. Here is where we start looking for the technical strategies and emotional insights that will not only help you weather the dangerous Survival Phase but will guide you to a level of achievement similar to those wildly successful clients who bravely took the leap.

Mixed Emotions in the Survival Phase

The term “survival” comes from the notion that you’re mostly just clawing and scratching to keep your business alive. And the struggle is real. According to a study by Harvard Business School senior lecturer Shikhar Ghosh, 75 percent of venture-backed start-ups fail.⁵ Also, according to the Small Business Association, 30 percent of all new businesses fail during the first two years, 50 percent during the first five years, and 66 percent during the first ten years.⁶

Numbers like these can be terrifying, of course, but let’s consider the positives about the Survival Phase. For instance, in some ways, running your business is as simple as it is ever going to be. Yes, the financial and technical stresses are high, but the number of stakeholders is the lowest it is ever going to be. The more your business grows, the more stakeholders you will take on, and the more people you will have to satisfy.

Right now, it’s just you, your family, and your partners (if you have them). Even if the money always seems tight and the day-to-day stresses are high, try to take comfort in the knowledge that you have a comparatively small number of people to keep happy. Meanwhile, your lifestyle is less complicated and less expensive now than it will be after your business meets with success, and you currently have fewer complexities to manage.

Obviously, it’s easier to state these truths than it is to believe them—especially when you’re living them in the moment. Entrepreneurs in this phase will have sleepless nights, stress, and anxiety. But it’s important to try to enjoy the fact that this portion of the Lifecycle presents you with so many opportunities to discover what you can do. New strengths and skills you didn’t even know you had will start to emerge as the excitement and demands of building a business moves you out of your comfort zone. You might, for instance, find yourself tapping into some previously unrealized people skills, management skills, and even sales skills. After all, if you’re going to keep your creditors at bay, then you have no choice but to make sales. It’s that famous Thomas J. Watson quote, “Nothing happens in business until something gets sold.”

Now that I’ve boosted your spirits, let’s return to everyone’s favorite subject and talk about creditors. It’s true that most entrepreneurs in the early days of the Entrepreneurial Lifecycle are absolutely swimming in debt. This can make every day feel like a fight for your life. Many entrepreneurs have to take out second mortgages, solicit financial help from family and friends, or fall under the thumb of outside investors. In this way, creditors become other stakeholders in your business. These circumstances tend to engender feelings of helplessness—the sense that much of what you’re trying to do is beyond your control, because if just one thing goes wrong or is delayed, you’ll drown in a sea of debt.

The funny thing about these warring emotions of excitement, anxiety, and fear is that while they can certainly cripple you with doubt, they can also motivate and inspire. It all depends on how you are hardwired to react. Young businesses come with a host of unique challenges, but your conflicted emotions motivate you to meet those challenges with at least something resembling confidence that you will succeed. One of the more positive side effects of this phenomenon is that whenever you do succeed, those small wins can make you feel like you’re on top of the world and nothing can stop you. The negative side effect, however, is that euphoria and overconfidence can compel you to make rash choices that end up harming your business.

For anyone in your shoes, the energy related to doing something new, exhilarating, creative, and self-driven mixes with all that fear and debt-related desperation to create a potent emotional cocktail—one that is sure to keep you up at night. So while we will explore some technical strategies to consider as you move your business toward the Growth Phase, the more immediate need to address is how to channel the emotional side. Finding that balance starts with examining the source of the emotions at play. No matter what kind of business you run or who your stakeholders happen to be, the source of your emotions is likely one or more of the same three factors: debt, cash flow, and drive.

Failures Will Happen: Embrace The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Wind and the Current
• Phase 1: Survival
• Phase 2: Maturation
• Phase 3: Transition
• Phase 4: The Day After
• Conclusion: Enhancing the Personal Experience and the Financial Result
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix
• About the Author