For those who still dream of having their own business, you must be equipped with the strenuousness to fight for your own vision day by day, with the power to confront your own emotions and to dismantle your own fears with the ability to risk and to understands that there is no success without failure or work. And for those who now have a job and dream about entrepreneurship, I emphasize that being an entrepreneur (the honest kind who pays the taxes with punctuality) does not mean having more free time; it does not mean to work less. On the contrary, it means something worth fighting: the freedom to turn your dream into reality, the freedom to choose what projects you want to get involved in, and what people/partners you want to have next, the freedom to experience and accept the error as a lesson intended to take you one step or more before. For me, entrepreneurship means the fulfillment you feel when what you have created, though, worked up to exhaustion is worth something for your customers, for the community in which you work, for the construction you believe in and where you put a brick every day through the effort your.
Paul Mccarthy from Cork summarizes the main lessons as an entrepreneur.
The team
I do not work with a large direct team; I prefer the model in which I outsource some important functions. At one point, I drew a line and realized that despite long-lasting collaboration and good intentions – some of the outsourced resources that I had surrounded me had no more expertise to help my business move to the next level according to agreed strategic direction. I realized that you could not operate with the same processes and specific skills in the start-up phase for the post-start phase, so this summer, we reorganized the team by giving up some of the old collaborations. I was very careful to fill the team with the missing skills, to select new suppliers and new colleagues. We have allocated three months to this process, but we already see positive results. I have learned that although very difficult, postponing team decisions, its competence – costs time, money, and sometimes (learning from lessons of others) it can even cost the business itself.
Leadership
Although I have 18-year driving experience, I know that when I tell myself that I know them and have seen them all begin my journey to incompetence. After five years of entrepreneurship, I think I have suffered a maturing as a leader of my own business and not as an intrapreneur. The following lessons relate to leadership.
I learned that the biggest barrier to my business might be me, the leader of this business. Why?
Because my mind says “I can” more than ever, but the day is 24 hours and when you go with several projects in parallel you risk defocusing is the greatest enemy of excellence, so more self-discipline, new leaders we want too much and too fast, do not ruin! I have learned that a vision without focus is just a deferred reality! More here.
Some dream a big, glorious business, others want a medium business that they can control
I realize more and more that every entrepreneur has the desire and the antidote, the action and the inaction – the way you manage to defeat yourself and your inner fears as an entrepreneur – builds the future your success. For me, the business expansion (desire) comes in the bundle with the fear that I will not have enough time for the family, for other personal projects, that the balanced life to which I aspire becomes that deferred vision, and so the anti-trust begins.
Sometimes, to give a new direction to your business, you need to stay away
I felt that my business had to take another direction, that my business model needs to know some major changes but that it is harder to see the change in the operational scene. I understand that I can use technology to explore new markets and new opportunities to expand my market and adapt my value to my new client types.
See this: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/entrepreneur.asp
I understand that I am a digital immigrant, that I was not born with “digital thinking” and that I have to learn more about it.