What Small Business is Really Like
Posted on July 10, 2013 by Alay Yajnik, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.
What Small Business is Really Like: Are we setting budding entrepreneurs up to fail?
Watching TV and seeing instant fame and success on the unreality shows, are we setting budding small business entrepreneurs up to fail? These shows all seem to show that in a few hours you can rocket from obscurity to fame, wealth and success. One hour. That’s all it takes.
As almost anyone who has started and grown their own small business knows, it’s not like that. It’s usually a tough hard road where you may fail 10 times before you get it all together and start growing. It’s tempting to give up when things go sideways, don’t work, an initial success suddenly goes flat, sales stop, money gets tight. But in the real world, those who persevere will almost always succeed.
Sir Winston Churchill said it best, “Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, give up. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up.”
Believe and you will succeed. It is essential to success. Yes, you do have to be smart, learn continually, adapt, adjust and do the right things, but if you don’t believe: Stop. You’re already finished. Go get a job.
Statistics have shown that about 95% of the population wants to own their own business and be their own boss, yet only about 1% ever do. It takes a unique combination of skills, guts and perhaps madness to break the addiction of the regular paycheck and go it alone, hang in when it doesn’t go right and scratch and scramble until you get it right.
Once started, you still have plenty of opportunities to fail, to plateau and stagnate. It could be your personality or the management model you patterned your style on (not all are good or productive) or it could be a failure to understand how the parts of business have to work well or nothing works well. You can fail to sell, overspend, over commit, grow yourself to death.
As a business coach, I work with entrepreneurs as their trusted advisor. Together we avoid the failures, climb to peaks from plateaus, and minimize stagnation. Together, we build strategies to maximize success and minimize risk. After all, running a small business is risky enough!
