The Roller Coaster Ride of Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is often portrayed as the ultimate career path for freedom, financial independence, and personal fulfilment. But behind the glamour of start-up success stories, there’s a less talked-about reality: failure, frustration, and moments of self-doubt. Having run multiple businesses over the years, I’ve experienced both sides of the coin. Some ventures succeeded, while others crashed and burned.
In this post, I’ll share the critical lessons I’ve learned from both my successes and failures, in hopes that they might help fellow entrepreneurs navigate their own journeys; especially for those who are the first entrepreneurs in their family.
Success Can Be Deceiving
When I give presentations at events, one of my favourite questions to ask is… “What does success look like to you“? This is often met with an initial silence, followed by the most obvious answer… financial independence, or in other words; money! It is true money makes the world go round, but money, should not define success!
I saw a quote which said… “Money is just a number, and numbers are infinite, if you chase money you will never be fully satisfied“. This resonated with me as from a young age I always benchmarked my success on the size of my bank account.
I remember the day I made my first sale, selling Sweet Tress back in High School. You would have thought I won the lottery! The euphoric feeling was something I had never felt before. At only 17 years old, I had no concept of reinvestment, or how to grow a business (despite selling trees; no pun intended). What I discovered was my success was driving my failure. The more money I made, the less I wanted to spend, and eventually the business went bust!
It’s common practice among every successful business that you must speculate to accumulate. Growing up with no one in my family who had any experience running a business, this concept was rather alien, and so I had to learn the hard way that money isn’t the only way to measure success.
So, what does success look like to you? Everyone has a different perspective, however, for me success is where my business/products are improving the lives of my customers and clients every single day. If you are doing something genuinely good, money will always follow.
Failure Is Your Friend - Embrace It
I’m sure everyone has heard of the saying that you learn more from failure than success. This is 100% true and accurate, however, the impact this has on you is often brushed over, and for good reason!
Pouring your time, money, and soul into a business only for it to crash and burn is arguably one of the hardest things to experience. The hopeless feeling that no matter what you do, it will never be good enough, is a hard pill to swallow. This is often when the self-deprecating thoughts of am I actually cut out to do this, should I quit and get a normal job?
One of my favourite quotes to date is… “Falling down is an accident. Staying down is a choice“! This is such a powerful message; no matter how devastating the blow, no matter how costly it has been, you cannot give up! Instead of viewing the failure in a negative way, consider it as a lesson well learned and apply it to your next venture!
Failure is not the opposite of success; it is part of success. You have to embrace it, you have to accept it, and prosper from the lessons gained! Failure forces you to confront your weaknesses, failure calls you out on your flaws and forces you to improve; this is something success can never teach you!
From personal experience having suffered several losses, it is the worst form of punishment for your mental health and well-being. The constant mental bombardment, finding the inner strength to pick yourself back up and start again is one of the most powerful forms of personal growth you can ever hope to amass! Yes, it hurts, and yes it sucks, but when the dust settles, you can always start again.
Proactive vs Reactive
Have you ever heard of the phrase “work smarter not harder“? While I agree to a certain extent, I truly believe that what you put in will always come out. Its basic physics and physics governs our lives. If you want to be part of the 1%, you have to be prepared to do what 99% of people are not, and that generally correleated to dedicated, hard work to pursue your goals!
Being proactive is something every entrepreneur should practice on a daily basis. Always on the lookout for the next opportunity, looking at ways to improve and optimise. Think of the Red Car Theory!
A key characteristic of entrepreneurs is relentless determination. Knowing to trust in the process; but what happens if this begins to have a negative impact on your business? This is exactly what happened to me. While being proactive is essential, you must also be reactive and set your ego aside from time to time!
I was invested in a joint partnership developing high-end spin tops just before the onset of the fidget spinner craze! I was so invested in our spin tops, I knew the market, I knew the demand, but I failed to react to the change in public perception towards the fidget spinner. This ultimately led to the downfall of our Kickstarter campaign which resulted in another failed venture.
By not reacting in a positive way, I decided to let my ego take over and go against the market; something I learned from day trading stocks is that you never bet against the market trend! Yet here I was letting my ego stand in the way of success!
Persistence Trumps Perfection
The greatest quality any entrepreneur can possess is the relentless determination to never give up. Persistence and consistency are the key drivers of success. No matter the background, no matter the niche, persistence always triumphs!
I am a huge admire of Rolls Royce, not only because I love their cars, but also their philosophy. Anytime I give presentations I always integrate them somewhere. Rolls Royce’s motto is to “Strive for Perfection“. While perfection can never be achieved it’s always in the perseverance of perfection we become great! This idea that your business will never be perfect and there’s always room for improvement will be invaluable to navigating the road to success.
In my experience thus far, I have found that you cannot be good at everything, you need to delegate to those who are better than you. For me, this is particularly so in marketing. I spent countless days and weeks trying to perfect campaigns which ultimately failed. This gave me two options moving forward, either delegate to a marketing professional, or try again but this time accept it will never be perfect.
If you are just starting out on your entrepreneurial journey then the best piece of advice is to forget about perfection, forget about getting everything right, it’s not going to happen, accept it and it will save you so much headaches down the line!
My Honest Advice
If you have made it that far, then I want to thank you for reading part of my story and I hope it has helped you in some way.
My honest advice about becoming an entrepreneur is to first ask yourself do you have the mental capacity to lose everything and start again. Do you have the motivation to work when everyone is out enjoying themselves? Can you face periods of depression and hopelessness? If your answer to those questions is YES, then I say you are the perfect fit to be an entrepreneur!
Know your success measuring criteria; strive for perfection, be resilient and adaptable at every point with a burning desire to never give up! Money is just a tool, to facilitate the fulfilling lifestyle you so desire! I wish you all the very best and I would love to connect with you if you have any questions or investment opportunities to collaborate!