Starting a Business
When starting a business, you’ll need a lot of things. However, these five things are not tangible things that you can see, touch, and buy such as a laptop, printer, and business cards.
These are the dig down deep into your soul kind of things.
In my blog post, Which Came First the Brand or the Business?, I’ve written about how I’ve been on and off the business struggle bus.
Five months into my journey, I realized two things. One, I needed to learn a new mindset, and two:
Starting a business is like starting a new diet and exercise program.
Does this sound familiar when you start a diet or start exercising?
- First, you realize you’ll need more time to:
- Go to the gym
- Go to the grocery store – no more fast food
- Prepare healthy food – kale chips, need I say more?
- Track your food
- Next, you realize old methods no longer work. You’ll need to learn new:
- Cooking skills – steam your veggies, bake your chicken nuggets, and don’t burn your kale chips.
- Exercise skills – learn how to not look like an idiot in the cardio HIIT class.
- Third, you encounter roadblocks, but you decide never to give up. Not even when it is:
- Superbowl Sunday and you’re going to that party with excellent food.
- Taco Tuesday at your favorite Mexican restaurant.
- Fourth, you’ll need to muster up some thick skin when your family and friends try to sabotage (knowingly or unknowingly) your goals. You have all heard this before:
- “Oh have some bread!”
- “It’s only one time, you can diet tomorrow!”
- “You only live once!”
- You’ll also need a thick skin when you fall off the treadmill at the gym.
- Finally, you’ll need to learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.
- Accept the fact you’ll need to step outside your comfort zone and eat kale or get 10,000 steps a day.
- Don’t give in to your feelings, push through to the other side of your emotions.
My list of the 5 things you need before starting a business.
This list is not meant to discourage anyone from going for their dream of having their own business. Use this as a checklist to mentally prepare yourself for attaining your goal. To summarize, here are the mindset changes you’ll need before starting a business.
- Time and more time
- Willingness to learn
- Resolve never to give up
- Thick skin
- Being comfortable with being uncomfortable
Mindset changes for starting a business
Time
- Give yourself enough time to start the business. In my honest opinion, you’ll need a year to feel fully established, especially if you are starting from nothing.
- Schedule time every day to work on the business. Schedule hours in your day for planning, creating, developing, implementing, and testing.
Willingness to learn
You’ll need the capacity to learn, the ability to learn and a willingness to learn.
Google how to start a business. Soon you’ll be on information overload, feeling as if you are already behind.
Start early with your research. Learn new skills such as how to do bookkeeping, how to negotiate, and how to write a proposal. The list could go on and on.
Learn little bits at a time.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Resolve never to give up
In essence, here’s how it goes. You start going crazy learning all the things and feeling less than by playing the comparison game. Eventually, you may want to give up. You say to yourself, “I was supposed to be earning 50K a month ago!”
Resolve never to give up. Now is the time to recalibrate. Rethink your goals. Are they too aggressive? It’s ok to give yourself more time and take the pressure off. If you quit your job, take a temp job for some cash, or if you still can’t leave your job just yet, it’s ok. There are no business start-up police looking for you. Just don’t give up on your dream. No matter how long it takes, keep on working on it.
Thick skin
People will doubt you. Not to mention, those individual family members who will continue to ask, “so how’s the business,” “are you making any money” or “how many clients do you have?”
At Thanksgiving your brother-in-law may even smirk at you after you say, “I’m working on it” (not speaking from experience or anything.)
Flick that comment off your shoulder and use it as motivation to keep on going and striving for success.
Being comfortable with being uncomfortable
Generally speaking, change is hard, but the result will be worth the effort. If it were easy, everyone would do it! Permit yourself to feel uncomfortable. Here’s a great quote:
