If you're reading this article, you're probably at a turning point in your life: you've thought about leaving your job as an employee and starting your own business. You've probably even gone so far as to look into the financial and legal implications, advantages and disadvantages of making the change. These are certainly important aspects, but be careful! Don't fall into the trap of missing a vitally important step: a thorough examination of your personality. Many people do not attach enough importance to getting to know themselves, even though it could determine the future of your entire business!
Whether you are an entrepreneur or an employee, you will have to deal with a lot of psychological factors in your life. Each of them will present you with different difficulties and challenges. Each person has a different personality and values, and different things are seen as a burden or a relief. These will determine whether entrepreneurship is right for you or whether you should look for a career as an employee, even in another job.
It's important to face the facts before making a decision and, if you do make a change, make sure you improve your skills!
Go through the questions below and answer them honestly for yourself! You will have done more for your career than many others!
1.
Do you dare to step out of your comfort zone to take risks?
The first and most important factor is whether you dare to take risks. Think about it: it takes a lot of courage even to quit your current job to start a business! But that's just the beginning! Running a business is constantly about whether you can step out of your comfort zone and dare to take on new challenges. What's more, most of the time the challenges don't even come naturally: you have to look for them. No matter how brilliant an idea you come up with, your business won't work if you sit back and wait for customers and investors to knock on your door and put money in your pocket. You'll have to keep going to business meetings, having uncomfortable or persuasive conversations, contacting new people, spending money on advertising or selling your idea to investors and buyers. These tasks are often risky and cost a lot of money, and there is no guarantee that they will pay off.
As an employee, most of the risk-taking is done for you by your boss, you just have to do what you are told. This doesn't mean that as an employee you don't have challenges, but they're usually not something you take on yourself, but are there for you as tasks to be done. As an entrepreneur, the choice is yours: take the risk or sit at your desk waiting for opportunities. Which of the two cases will lead you to success is obvious.
2.
Can you be passionate?
Can you be passionate and totally committed to something? And we're not talking about cheering for your favourite football team. The question is rather, has there ever been something in your life that you were passionate about, something you could give yourself to with total dedication? It could even be a hobby! The point is that you put effort into it without hardly noticing, because you enjoyed every minute of it. Because you should know that a good entrepreneur is not just after the money. Even as an employee, it shows in your work if you don't really enjoy it. But as an entrepreneur, the whole of your business reflects your enthusiasm or boredom and discouragement as a manager, which is also reflected in the income. It's important that your passion is not fuelled primarily by money, but by your service or product.
Ask yourself the question: will you love what you offer to others? It's the only way to be authentic as an entrepreneur.
If you are not enthusiastic about new challenges, then entrepreneurship may not be for you. A good entrepreneur will never sit back. And if they do, they are eager to think about what they should do the next day and how they should do it. There is a sense of excitement in them. If you feel this kind of heated enthusiasm, it's probably worth taking the plunge!
3.
How persistent and committed are you to your goal?
What happens when the initial enthusiasm runs out? Perseverance must remain! Let's look at a simple example. When you were learning to ride a bike, you probably fell a lot. This is only natural because you had to practise. But did you learn to do it? Pretty much, yes. Let's look at what helped you the most: probably your parents or older siblings who held your and helped you get up when you fell. And you diligently kept practicing. Now, something this is also the case at a better workplace, where you work as a team. There are difficulties and pitfalls, but you're never alone.
However, imagine this in a business: now you'll have to learn all by yourself, with no one to help you through the difficulties. And how many more difficulties there are in a business! You have to be prepared for constant setbacks, even though you will have to work much harder in the beginning than as an employee! You may feel that you just keep doing it, but with no results. Unlike at a job where even if you're not doing well, you'll still get paid at the end of the month. In business, it' s perseverance that will eventually pay off for you!
The question is: can you live with the initial uncertainty and fear of failure, even if you face several obstacles? Can you start again once something has gone wrong? This is the point in an entrepreneur's life that has to be played out on the mental battlefield: you are either overwhelmed by the feeling of uncertainty and you give up or you move on.
4.
Are you controlled internally or externally?
Internally controlled people are those who feel themselves in charge of their lives. In contrast, people with an externally controlled personality blame factors outside of themselves for the course of events in their own lives and allow external opinions to stop them. Of course, it is important to pay attention to what is happening around you, but you need to know whose opinions you are listening to and whose you are not. A successful entrepreneur needs to have internal control, as he or she needs to know how to overcome adversity without expecting change from outside.
Think about it: who did you blame the last time something didn't turn out the way you really wanted it to? The survival of a business often depends on your ability to adapt and redesign things if you have to. You need to be able to admit when you've made a mistake and recognise when something doesn't work – even if you were originally immensely proud of your idea. If you're not able to be flexible and do something to change things, you will overlook the needs of your market!
5.
Do you have enough self-discipline?
Becoming an entrepreneur can be both fantastically liberating and at the same time deeply frustrating. No more alarms ringing in the morning to get you to work on time, no more to-do lists from your boss, no more time constraints on what you have to get done and when, or when you can go out for lunch. This is something most entrepreneurs really enjoy in the early days. However, this kind of lack of control can turn into a scary feeling and can be more stressful than being tied down in the long run.
As an entrepreneur, you won't have an organisational infrastructure behind you, so everything will only happen if you make it happen yourself. You will have to take care of the administrative and technical tasks, as well as of secretarial duties. To avoid the stress of feeling out of control, you need to set yourself both short-term and long-term goals. You need to sit down in front of your calendar and, like a boss to his subordinates, set yourself deadlines for tasks. Every day you'll need to know what you will do that day to achieve your long-term goals!
However, it's not enough to make plans! You also need to stick to them, which will require a great deal of self-discipline! While as an employee your boss will check that you're doing your job properly, as an entrepreneur no one will call on you if you're lounging on the sofa instead of getting on with your work. Of course, there is a positive side to this, as you can manage your time yourself: you can work or spend time on your hobbies or family whenever you want. The reverse, however, is also true: while as an employee you work your 8 hours (in the best-case scenario, that is, if you don't have to work overtime) and don't take your work home, as an entrepreneur you can't always afford not to answer the phone or reply to an email or two while you're having a family dinner in the evening.
So you'll have to work just as hard. The question is, can you bring yourself to sit down to work without your boss looming over you? Do you have the self-discipline to devote time to work when you need to, instead of your favourite TV show?
6.
Do you consider yourself an individual or team player?
When you become independent from your job as an entrepreneur, you lose the sense of belonging to a community and the security of community support. Most people – even if they often don't know it about themselves – thrive in community. Many new entrepreneurs are eager to escape the conflict-filled workplace and after a few months realise how much they miss the daily network of relationships where they had common goals. The nascent entrepreneur has fewer stimuli: his phone rings less often, he attends meetings less frequently and receives few erinquiries, so he can quickly get a feeling of loneliness.
Think about how you cope with the limitations imposed by others and their expectations. How stressful do you feel adjusting to others? If these are things that really frustrate you, then you're probably better suited to being an entrepreneur. Based on your life experience so far, think also about how you can deal with feelings of having to rely solely on yourself and solitude. If you find it difficult, you may want to consider continuing as an employee or starting a community business where you're not alone.
It's important to make it clear that being an entrepreneur doesn't necessarily mean you'll be all alone! However, you will have to do a lot more for your relationships than as an employee.
Ask yourself: what social skills do you have and will you be able to seek out or build new relationships for yourself?
7.
How open-minded are you?
One of the outstanding qualities of entrepreneurs is that they are curious and open to anything new and unusual. These are character traits without which they would not get ahead. If you're not innovative, your competitors will leave you behind! Ask yourself if you can see opportunities in life that others cannot! Are you curious about anything new in your future business that will allow you to stay one step ahead of the market? As an entrepreneur, you will have to look for problems that do not yet exist or do not have the right solution for the time being.
You must not only be open to new ideas, but also to educating yourself! As an employee, the training courses were probably organised and financed for you by your boss, and you had to attend even when you didn't feel like it. As an entrepreneur, you will have to take care of this yourself, so that you always have up-to-date and marketable knowledge!
8.
How do you cope with failure?
As an entrepreneur, you will inevitably encounter failures. On a daily basis, you will have to be able to cope with rejections, customer callbacks not happening, disappointments or even condescending and negative comments. You'll probably have a plan that will take you through your to-do list, but the desired results won't always turn out as described in the theoretical textbooks. But that's the nature of being an entrepreneur! You have to learn to see these as learning opportunities and valuable feedback! The question is, do you have the confidence to be able to handle these failures?
Think about it: what coping strategies have you used in difficult situations in your life so far? Have you been able to think creatively and solve problems? Even as an employee, there are problems to solve at work, but as an entrepreneur, there will be many more, and you will have to keep them under control!
9.
Are you able to take responsibility and make decisions?
If you're an employee, your boss makes most of the decisions and bears the lion's share of the responsibility. Now, as an entrepreneur, all of this falls on your shoulder. You will have to make decisions and take responsibility for them on a day-to-day basis. What's more, once you have employees, you'll be responsible not only for your own life, but for the lives of many other people as well.
Think about how difficult or easy you find it to make decisions, especially in tough situations. Some people find this a huge stress, while others find it hard to let others take decisions that affect them.
+1
What do you want to do years later?
It's also important to take the time to answer this question. Think about what situation you can imagine yourself in 1, 5 and 10 years from now! What is it that you're committed to and would enjoy doing every day?
If you feel that it's time to start a business and you need highly practical online marketing knowledge that can help you understand online customer acquisition marketing tools and processes and create your own strategy, learn more about our training material!
