The Truth About Entrepreneurship

Hey Friend Hey!!

It’s my first blog post of 2017, better late than never and why not start the year off with some important truth.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS HARD

I don’t mean to scare you and I am definitely not trying to get you to abandon your dreams of being an entrepreneur, but I want to set you up for success. You know that over the years I have started a few businesses, some that are no longer with us… RIP, and some that are very successful, but the failure and success come at a price.

I’m going to only share 3 of those devastating things I’ve learned about entrepreneurship and my prayer is that they help you along the journey that you either are on, or will start some day. You will lose friends, or those you thought were your friends.
1. I’ve been in the world of entrepreneurship since 2002, while I was attending college and boy was that a rude awakening. I went from earning I think $7 a hour as a Resident Assistant at my college, to some months $5000 in my network endeavor. I was no longer buying everything on credit cards, but with cash, traveling the world and having a whole lot of fun doing so, might I add. But the unfortunate thing I learned really quickly was that I was losing friends. Now, I’ll be honest, some of these friends I lost because of my behavior and unfortunate ego of thinking I was the cats meow, but others didn’t see to appreciate the success I was having or that I was become a better version of myself.

That was a very hard pill to swallow, because in my younger years I just knew that everyone around me loved, supported and was rooting for my success, however that wasn’t my reality.

     2. Your skill is not enough to have a successful business. 

When I launched my branding firm in 2016, I was fully persuaded that I had everything it took to run a successful branding and consulting firm, until I had my first custom complaint. The complaint had nothing to do with the work that we performed but organization, timeliness, and providing our clients with up front information.

Honestly, I was DEVASTATED! I just knew I knew what I was doing, but I was humble enough to not only admit my weaknesses, but ask for feedback on what we could do better. Receiving the feedback was a whole other ball of wax, because everyone doesn’t know how to use a filter, lol, but nonetheless it was very valuable information.

However, I learned a lot during that time, and was forced to implement systems, process, contracts and learn more on the technical things than I really ever wanted to.

I have a great gift of creation and the eyes I have been given are straight from heaven above, but my skill for creativity was not enough when it was time to implement organization in my company, hiring, firing among many other things.

3. Expenses of running a business are HIGH!

Lemme tell you, THIS WAS AN AWAKENING! When you think about possibly running for example an online business, you may think all that you need is wifi and a laptop right? WRONG!

You are going to need: Email Marketing System, Payment Processing, System to organize your team, hosting for your website and many other things. When I ran  my business part time, I only needed a few things because business stayed at a certain level, but the moment I went full time, with full time demands and working with full time contract workers… WHEW!

You are no longer making part time income and doing with it as you please, but you are investing it each week and month into the systems that make your business operate and most of those items will NOT be free. Why? They gotta make money too right?

So to say that entrepreneurship is hard, is probably an understatement because its harder than what most people may ever admit to you, BUT its also EXTREMELY rewarding, but we will chat about that some other time.

So if you are considering going into entrepreneurship, or going full time, be sure to count all of the costs and take your time.

Entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint.