Okay, so you work for the “man” but you’ve always wanted to start your own business. I know. I know. It’s downright difficult to gather enough courage to follow through. What happens if you fail? What happens if you don’t have enough money to pay your bills? What if you can’t feed your children or keep a roof over your head or pay back the mountain of debt that’s effectively buried you?
Yes, there are a lot of reasons to not start your own business. They involve impending doom — a personal cataclysmic event akin to a nuclear destruction. An implosion if you will. There are what-ifs swirling around in your mind like a hawk encircling its prey. Sure, there are a lot of reasons to be afraid. There are a lot of reasons to question your sanity when considering to go into business for yourself.
But what happens if you don’t do it? What happens 10 years from now when you’re in the same situation that you’re in right now at this very moment because you didn’t start your own business? Then what? What would the future be like if you didn’t take the risks and put it all on the line today?
If you don’t want to be in the same place, or even worse, than you are today, financially, mentally and emotionally, then starting your own business needs to become a priority. But don’t kid yourself. This will be a monumental task, quite possibly one of the most difficult undertakings you’ve ever engaged in throughout your entire life.
It will command all your resources and your time. You will need to make some massive sacrifices. It won’t be easy. I’m not sitting here and trying to kid you about it. But it will be worth it. There are plenty of reasons you should start your own business now, without putting it off and waiting another moment. In fact, there will never be a perfect moment to do it. Never.
The most successful people and businesses in the world have added the most value. If you want to succeed, you need to do the same. However, as an individual working for someone else, it’s hard to add the type of value you can add when starting and running your own business. It just doesn’t work the same way.
Also, when you’re running your own business, the value that you’re creating is owned by you and only you. You’re not helping to line someone else’s pockets. It’s benefiting you while also helping others out there in need of your expertise. If you really dig deep and create a product or service that will improve the lives of others, then your success will be off the charts.
When you build a business and you work sincerely to help people to solve a problem or fill a need, you end up connecting with others. It’s a natural occurrence. And as human beings, we have a need for connection. We have a need to feel that what we’re doing is impacting others.
Whether you start a business building products, providing services, or delivering valuable information, you naturally connect with others as a result of it. And when what you’re doing truly delves into the necessity to help others and the desire to deliver real value, that’s when the strongest bonds and connections happen. Life long friends are found like this.
At the start of any career, it might be necessary to work for others. You’re investing your time to to help grow their business. You watch as it blossoms and balloons in front of your eyes, and your work has a sincere impact on their bottom line. But when you operate your own business, it gives you the chance to invest in yourself rather than in someone else’s dream.
When you’re running a business, the time you spend working on anything related to your business is an investment in yourself. You’re not helping someone else grow their bottom line, you’re helping to grow yours. In turn, you’re working on your dream. With every step and turn, you’re building a legacy and setting a firm foundation for the future.
By no means is it easy to build a business. It takes an enormous amount of effort, skill and persistent action. In the beginning, you might find it financially draining. It will make you put it all on the line at times. You might find yourself, one day, in a situation over your head, wondering how you’re even going to keep the lights on, so to speak.
But eventually, over time, things do improve. As long as you don’t give you and you keep pushing through, seeking ways to refine your skills, cut your expenses and grow your business, it will lead to financial success. Starting a business won’t make you rich in the beginning, but it might just do that over time depending on how committed you stay to it.
As a business owner, you have the freedom of time. Not in the beginning. Eventually, of course. But once your business is up and running and things are flowing smoothly, and you’re able to find the right people to help you build your dream, you’ll have more time to focus on the things that really matter in life.
You’ll have more time to spend with your family, or to take a trip to some far-off destination. You can dictate how you get to spend your day. At the outset it won’t happen. But imagine the freedom that this would afford you when money is simply free-flowing and time becomes your ally rather than your enemy.
As your own boss and the proprietor of your own business, you get to delegate roles to others. How will you spend your time? Where is your time best utilized with the most efficient results? You can live by the credo of the 80/20-rule and delegate the busy work to others on your team so that you can focus on the bigger picture.
This is a great way to build your business. When you’re running your own business, you get to call these types of shots. You don’t have to listen to someone else’s so-called expert advice. It’s you that gets to decide. As long as you make the right decisions, there’s no limit to how big you can grow that business.
By starting and operating your own business, you receive a wide array of tax deductions that you normally might not receive while working as an employee for another company. Depending on where you live, and in accordance to the local, state and federal regulations of your municipality, these tax deductions can make a huge difference in your overall fiscal picture.
All of the money you invest into yourself to grow the business, and all your related business expenses are of course deductible. You should find a great financial advisor and accountant in your area and meet with them often as you can to grow your business. In the beginning, there will be a big learning curve. But over time, you’ll develop the tools necessary for explosive growth.
At the outset, when you first start a business, it might not seem like you’re developing an asset. In the beginning, it might seem like a frustrating expedition, having to learn from many costly mistakes. But a business, when developed the right way, can turn into a very big asset.
When you pour your time and energy into growing something, there’s no saying how valuable of an asset it might turn into. With each passing month, as you grow that business, it will become more and more valuable. Depending on sales and the industry you’re in, your business could be worth 10 to 20 times your annual sales amount if you were to ever sell. That’s huge.
No matter what anyone else thinks, when you’re working for someone else, no matter the size of that business, you’re capped with your ability to earn. Unless you’re at the helm of a Fortune 100 company, with an endless array of stock options, then your ability to earn will be severely limited.
However, as a business owner, you have the ability to earn far more money than when working for someone else. Maybe not in the very beginning. But, considering that you’re calling the shots, the choice is yours on where the profits will go. After re-investing, clearly the profits can come back to you. You will make far more money over time as a business owner than you will otherwise.
There’s a pride of ownership when running a business that simply doesn’t exist when you work for someone else. That pride of ownership forces you to put care and detail into all the work that you do. You know, deep down inside, that every step you take and decision you make with the business reflects back on you.
And when you truly care about what you’re doing, and you truly care about your clients, no matter what happens in your business, it helps to fortify your character. You learn and reach new understandings about things, growing, shaping and molding your character along the way. It’s very real and very empowering.
As a business owner, you always have to be learning and expanding your knowledge in your craft and in the industry. As an employee, you can learn skills, yes. But, depending on your position as an employee, it likely won’t be a requisite. However, learning new skills is a great way to expand your knowledge set and become a more valuable employee either way you look at it.
Still, as a business owner, not only do you have the opportunity to learn new skills, but it’s almost a necessity. It’s part of investing in yourself. And with each new skill you learn, your ability to improve the business you started will increase substantially. It won’t happen overnight. But it will eventually happen.
Business schools and business theory can teach you a lot about the business world. It can allow you to glean important lessons from entrepreneurs who made it through some of the toughest times in their lives. But it won’t give you that real-world knowledge that you can only gain by working for yourself.
When you start and run your own business, you have no choice but to gain all of that real-world knowledge that’s awaiting you. If you don’t, you’ll end up failing. While you have almost no choice, it’s a set of invaluable experiences that will help to mold and shape you into a better person, allowing you to better understand your desires and dreams and just what it takes to achieve success.
As a business owner, you’re going to face many obstacles. And these won’t be just small obstacles. You’re going to run into major stumbling blocks and even fail a few times. You might run out of money and feel the necessity to quit, even at the best of times. It will be downright difficult, and very taxing on you emotionally, physically, financial, mentally and even spiritually.
However, when you’re backed into a corner and you have no choice but to succeed, something else takes over deep down inside of you. You tend to overcome those major obstacles little by little. And with each major obstacle that you overcome, you become a better person, more attuned to life, people and the world around you.
While no one should ever start a business solely for recognition, when you do operate your own business, you have the chance to be recognized for doing something that you love doing in the first place. Because, when you are doing what you love, you’ll go out of your way to do it the best possible way you can.
This doesn’t solely mean you’ll gain recognition through an award or through some governing body. Even if all you gain is the recognition from your customers that you’re doing a great job, that’s all you need to feel a certain sense of fulfillment that comes along with this type of thing.
When you operate your own business, it affords you with the ability to leave something behind. You can work on building a legacy while building your business, something you can leave for your kids to remember you by. It isn’t something that happens overnight; it happens over time as you work on building and growing that business.
Any time you’re passionate about what you’re doing, it gives you the sincere chance to build something of real value that people can remember you by. It isn’t just a paycheck. While the paycheck helps, that’s not why you’re doing it. And by being passionate about the business you’re running, it really allows you to build something noteworthy.
There have been plenty of people who’ve inspired others in the past by starting and staying committed to a business. And some of the most famous people who failed have inspired us the most with their stories. When you choose to begin a business and you really stick it out, some incredible things begin to happen.
While I won’t sit here and tell you that it’s easy by any measure, it is something fulfilling in that it helps you to develop the tools to really succeed in life. And, when people around you see you doing it, they’re inspired to do it themselves. They realize that anything truly is possible when you put your mind to it.
Every business owner is forced to really understand people and be able to identify genuine talent in other people. Whether you hire those people as employees, or you simply enter into partnerships with them, there’s a real chance you can meet some incredible people during the course of your business dealings.
And, what you’ll come to realize is that your business is only as good as the people that you hire. This will force you to truly learn how to identify the genuinely talented people and tell them apart from the others. It’s a skill that you’ll come to find to be invaluable to the success of your business.
You are only as good as your team. But, identifying talented people and building a solid team don’t necessarily go hand in hand. You need to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each employee and ensure that you’re pairing them into small teams that will thrive within the overall working environment.
You also need to ensure that you have a healthy environment for the team members to work in. This has as much to do with you and your state of mind and emotions as it does to do with them. Happy employees will thrive. If you sow an environment of fear and upset, you won’t be able to build a solid team.
One of the best parts about starting and owning your own business is the ability to create the work environment that you desire. Not what someone else wants. If you want to create a structured environment, you can do that. If you intend to create a loose environment where employees can get creative and thrive, you can do that also.
It’s entirely up to you. You can get to call the shots. You don’t have to approve it through someone else. It’s your desires and wishes that are being realized. Anything that you harbor can come to fruition because you’re at the helm of the business. This is extremely empowering and inspiring at the same time.
Building a business is one of the surest pathways for fulfilling your mission in life, whatever that might be. When you build a business around your personal mission, and that mission involves helping others and spreading a lot of value throughout the world, some tremendous things tend to happen.
While the learning curve might be steep, it’s a cathartic sense of release to be able to push forward towards your deepest desires. This isn’t just about money; this is about doing something worthwhile in life, and leaving something behind that people can remember you by. Not only is it your legacy, but it’s also your mission — what you’ve always wanted to achieve in life.
One of the natural byproducts of starting and building a business is that you become an authority in your field. You spend so much time immersed in the field and understanding all its nuisances, that you can’t help but become an authority. You learn everything there is to know about the field, mastering it alone the way.
In turn, people look to you for advice. You become a central repository for all things related to your business, field and niche. People take notice. So do search engines like Google because people begin to share and link to your content. Over time, your notoriety naturally increases along with your income.
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