Employee to Entrepreneur
The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.
Nolan Bushnell
As a business owner, for many years I never saw myself as an entrepreneur, just a business owner. There are many differences between an employee, an entrepreneur and a business owner. I wanted to start with this chapter because I want to get you in the right mindset of working not only as someone who owns a business, but rather an entrepreneur, someone who is innovative in their business, not just working in it. Someone who’s working on their business as well.
What are some of the key reasons why thinking like an entrepreneur, as opposed to an employee, is important when it comes to creating a profitable business? First of all, you’ll be in the right playing field and have clarity about your business. Between an employee, a business owner and an entrepreneur, there are different ways of thinking. A lot of the time as an employee, you turn up to a job, do the best that you can each day, then go home and the jobs done.
As a self-employed business owner, it’s very similar. We turn up to our jobs and we’ve also got the added responsibility of making sure that we have clients in our appointment book. Making sure that
we’re attracting new clients in if we haven’t quite got a full book yet and making sure people know about what we do. Whereas an entrepreneur is thinking on a much bigger scale. An entrepreneur also looks into who their target market is, refines what they want their ideal client to look like so that they can target the people they want flowing in their business whilst also being clear on what it is they want out of their business as well.
An entrepreneur also knows the rules of business. They master them and when they’ve mastered the rules, they know how they can bend or break the rules. You see, a lot of the time employees learn the rules and play by the rules. Business owners generally learn the rules and master the rules.
Another key point is understanding what drives you and using it to your advantage. Some of the questions you can ask yourself are:
- What drives you in business?
- What drives you to have a business?
- What was the defining moment that helped you make that decision?
- Did you enough of working in a salon or did you envisioned yourself as a business owner from the get go?
Entrepreneurs know their own behavioural strengths and play on that.
Another reason why it’s important is, you skip the trial and error phase. Having an entrepreneurial mindset already puts you in the front seat. It gives you the advantage of thinking differently. Instead of thinking like an employee, you shift your paradigm and interpret things differently to help you plan and grow your business.
When you can see the bigger picture of where your business is going you can make better decisions, and a lot of the time, skip a lot of the rookie mistakes where people who are in business, who have an employee mindset make, because they are yet to make that transition to the entrepreneurial way of thinking.
And lastly the entrepreneur mindset gets you to look differently at your business. Again, where do you want to take your business? Have you thought about the different ways you can do business whether you’re there or not?
I’d love to share with you this statistic that I found about Australian small businesses. When I read about it, I thought, yep, I can definitely relate to it because I’ve seen it with my own eyes. The statistic? In the period of 2007 to 2011, 60 percent of businesses failed in Australia. This statistic relates to sole proprietor or self-employed businesses. And 40 percent of small businesses were not profitable.
How many people do you know who’ve started a business and are just scraping by? Maybe lucky if they’re breaking even. And how long do you think they can sustain running a business like that? More often than not, these people end up going back to a job only because they need to have some sort of steady income coming in to sustain their lifestyle, which their business was failing to bring in. When I read this statistic, I thought there is no way am I going to be one of those numbers.
I want to share with you a quote that I absolutely love. I only found it the other day too.
Success consists of going from failure to failure without the loss of enthusiasm.
Winston Churchill.
What I love about this quote is that many people that have really achieved success will tell you that they’ve had so many failures before they hit their target, that sweet spot that tipped them over the edge to success.
So the difference that makes the difference with those who do succeed in business and who are seriously committed to growing their business is exactly this: when they see a setback or have a failure in their business, they don’t see it as a failure as such, because, well what is a failure, really? How I define failure is that it hasn’t gotten you the result that you wanted. Failure is not the be all and end all.
One of my favourite sayings is failure is an option to re-route, just like a G.P.S system. You’ve got your end in mind, you have your set route to take. So you take a wrong turn. What happens to the GPS? It starts finding you a different direction to still take you to that same destination. It may take you a few more minutes or it might even be a faster way, who knows? But at the end of the day, it will still get you to the destination even though it wasn’t the original route.
So be passionate about what you’re doing. Take on board the fact that running a business will have its challenges. You will have setbacks, you will have what you may perceive as a failure, but it’s not really a failure. If you stop and think, it just means that the specific steps you took at that moment did not work to get your desired outcome.
I was listening to Anthony Robbins (my personal development hero) this morning and he made a great point. He said that Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, went through over ten thousand failures before he invented the electric light bulb. And one of his friends when coming up toward that ten thousandth failure said “When are you going to learn to give up and quit, because you’ve failed so many times?” Thomas Edison replied “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found the nine hundred and ninety-ninth thousand way not to make an electric light bulb. I did learn how to make a small explosion though and that could be useful somewhere else”.
And of course, what happened with that mindset? He invented the light bulb. He got to the end result because he was absolutely passionate, committed, he knew his end result and he wasn’t going to stop until he got there. He didn’t lose his enthusiasm; he still had his passion and his fire for achieving his outcome. As they say, success leaves clues and I think there is a really big clue here about remaining persistent in achieving your goals. Around entrepreneurship, another saying I found that I loved that I really resonated with is the following picture.
I absolutely love this. I’ve seen my role models do this, achieve this and I aim toward this myself every day.
One of my mentors in the last four and a half years, has hit a million dollar coaching business. She’s very driven, determined and she knows exactly what she wants. She also understands that sometimes you must make a couple of sacrifices along the way. You really have to put your head, your heart and soul in the business. You got to know what you want out of your business and most importantly you’ve got to think differently to most business owners.
And yes, there will be many setbacks along the way. She’s had a few, but it still hasn’t stopped her from achieving her lifestyle goals and becoming a true entrepreneur because she knew exactly what she wanted to achieve. One of her goals was to get her husband out of a day job and into the business and she achieved that. You see, entrepreneurship is not just about owning a business. It’s about giving generously to your target market, being innovative, creating your desired lifestyle and doing things the way you want so that it gives you more choices around how you want to live your life.
If you love to work, that’s great, you can go to work, go home only to go back to work again the next day and repeat this cycle 5 days a week. If you prefer the safety, security and comfort of paid employment then feel free to put this book away as it’s not for you. Entrepreneurship gives you more options. If you choose to be more flexible with your time and still want to make enormous amounts of money, it can be done. The time-for-money concept we all know too well in our industry can be sha...