Running Your Own business is Hard (part 1)

Wednesday, October 4, 2006 at 06:49am by Evan Prieskop in Start-Ups

Two weeks ago I described the whole body of start-up oriented non-fiction as essentially reducible to the following list:

Running your own business is hard.
Be smart.
Do what you love.
Change the world for the better.

Furthermore, I promised to return to the list to elucidate.

This will be the first in a four-part series, published irregularly throughout the next several weeks, fulfilling that promise.

Running Your Own business is Hard.

Different books put greater or lesser emphasis on this point, but all will mention it at least once.

“Hard” is a slippery word, with more than one possible interpretation. Hard may refer to the long hours and dedicated follow-through that small business start-ups demand. Another might say small-businesses are hard because of the prodigious failure rate of new businesses. Still another may speak of the high (relative to most careers) initial investment, the broad knowledge requirements, or the inevitable stress.

Start-up business owners can and will face all of these hardships…plus one other. The central and most painful difficulty all business owners face comes from within. Whether you are a type-A worry-wart, a laid back optimist, or an alpha-dog go-getter sometime, somewhere, that little voice in the back of your head is going to rear up and inform you of just how devastating unqualified you are.

Challenges without precedent will materialize and you will have idea how to face them. You are not strong enough to whether the long hours that drag upon your willpower and very flesh. You are unqualified. No one is qualified. No one knows how to open up your business, not even you.

So what?

The hardest part about opening your own business is getting over how hard opening your own business is. It is hard. You may fail. But the world is full of small businesses started by regular people working with insufficient experience, shoestring budgets, and looming fears.

You will need to look within yourself and find at very least the three virtues I listed last week. You will need to think long and hard on your decision to take on all the various and uncertain hardships of a small business start up. You will have to carefully weight the risks and rewards. But, disconcertingly, you are also going to have to let it all go. One day you have to look at the broken landscape ahead, shrug, and proceed.

The journey is all.

Go to Part 2 >>

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