National Entrepreneur’s Day

Intro Music:
Welcome to An Owner’s Guide for Your Life, the podcast that combines psychology, coaching, common sense and fun. I’m Tracey Browning, an entrepreneur, life coach, and lover of people. Now let’s talk about how to live love, make money, and change the world.

Tracey:
Hey, I’m glad you’re here. This is episode 31, and I invite you to raise your glass with me, filled with the beverage of your choice. Raise your glass and toast entrepreneurs.

Now, my glass is actually a cup of coffee because that’s the way most entrepreneurs I know start their day. So I’m raising a cup of coffee because Tuesday, November 16 is National Entrepreneur Day. Let’s just take a few minutes to celebrate entrepreneurship.

Now, maybe you are an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is just somebody who creates a new business. Now I say it so casually. It’s just someone who creates a new business. Holy cow. That’s amazing. You create a new business. Wow.

Every business begins in the heart and mind of an entrepreneur. Now, some businesses stay as a solopreneur, and some grow to be small businesses. Some grow to be ginormous businesses. Yes, that’s a technical designation. Ginormous businesses. You know what I mean.

But no matter what business it is, it all started in the brain of somebody who said, “Hey, I think I want to start my own business.”

Well, entrepreneurs. I salute you.

I am an entrepreneur. I’m married to an entrepreneur, and I am surrounded by so many amazing entrepreneurs.

Now, as I was thinking about this, I was kind of flipping through, reading some different articles, looking at surveys, some really interesting statistics about entrepreneurship. Here’s one from a Babson survey. 62% of adults believe that entrepreneurship is a good career move. I like that. Yeah. Okay. Over half of the survey, they thought it could be a good thing to be an entrepreneur. Now, here’s the part- also 40% of those respondents thought it was easy to start a business.

Now you can’t see me, but maybe you can pick up on it in my voice tone. Here I am, rolling my eyes so hard, I am looking out of the back of my head right now.

40% of these people think it’s easy to start a business. The only way that that makes any sense to me is that maybe, just maybe, I could agree that it’s easy to START a business. The challenge, the real challenge, lies in continuing your business day after day after day. That’s where the rubber meets the road. I don’t really like that statistic, but good golly, it sure gets a reaction from me. 40% think it’s easy to start a business. Good golly. Okay.

So after that reaction, you might be thinking, “Well, Tracey, why would anybody want to be an entrepreneur if it’s hard?” Well, a few of the main reasons people want to start their own businesses, they want to be their own boss. They want to pursue a passion. They want to make a difference in the world.

There’s a survey from GoDaddy. They said entrepreneurs favor flexibility five times more than the potential to make money. Think about that- five times more flexibility over the potential to make money. We want to be in charge of our days, of our lives, over what matters and making a difference. And sometimes it’s as simple as being able to take off work, to pick your child up or make their games. And sometimes it’s about deciding which customers and which clients you want to deal with. There’s all kinds of things tied up in that flexibility, but being in control, more control of your life, your work and your life. That’s just such a powerful statement there, that they favor flexibility five times more than the potential to make money.

Now I also came across some things that entrepreneurs think about themselves. A FreshBooks survey said here are the top three skills business owners think that you need to have to be successful. You need communication skills, problem solving skills and time management skills. I want to tweak this just a little bit. I’m not a big fan of time management.

I like to say self management because you need to be able to make decisions and prioritize and follow through and be disciplined. It’s about so much more than just managing your time. You’re managing your mind and your energy and your time.

So I say communication, self management, and I like the problem solving, but I’d also throw in decision making with it. It’s slightly different, but it’s related. I come back to power law theory that I came across in the book Essentialism, that certain efforts yield exponentially greater results. And a skilled entrepreneur can more easily look for and identify what efforts to pay attention to to get those exponential results and which efforts to just kind of let slide. You’ve got to have the decision making ability and the knowledge to go, “All right. Do I need to work on my website now, or do I need to devote the time and energy to having one on one meetings with potential clients?” You’ve got a finite amount of time and energy. You can’t do it all at once. You’ve got to solve your problems. You’ve got to decide.

Now communication. With prospective clients, vendors, suppliers, employees.

The communication with prospective clients is otherwise known as sales and marketing. If you’ve got a business, you have to have sales. The ultimate goal of your business, whatever it is, is to make money. You have to have sales and marketing. And I think that’s where the rub is is that you might start a business because you’ve got a passion or you want to have control over your day and you understand the technology or you understand the intricacies of whatever your business is but especially if you’re beginning by yourself. An entrepreneur typically will wind up being everything in the business and sales and marketing may not be your strong suit. It often is not the strength that an entrepreneur has unless you’re coming in as an experienced salesperson.

So being a strong communicator, a good problem solver, decision maker, having good self management. Those are such important skills for an entrepreneur.

Now, I want to wrap up my kind of lengthy toast to entrepreneurs with this final statistic: 92% of entrepreneurs say they don’t regret starting their business.

Here’s to you, entrepreneurs, you brave, determined hardy souls. Let’s manage ourselves.
Let’s live, let’s love. Let’s make some money and change the world.

For a transcript of this episode or for more information about life and mindset coaching, visit my website https://www.tbrowning.com/.