Becoming an Entrepreneur

When you decide to start your own business, you know that you’ll have to make sacrifices, but the reality is you end up making more sacrifices than you ever imagined making. We all want our businesses to be successful, but success is very rarely achieved without hard work. I made countless sacrifices, and these sacrifices are even harder to make in the beginning when you’re not sure if your business will succeed or not.

Keep Working (for now)

Many people are tempted to quit their job in the very early days of setting up their own company, but often, this is an extremely risky decision. Very few startups turn a profit in the first year and unless you have significant savings, you’re only adding to the stress of trying to grow your own business. I stayed at my job while struggling to stabilize my cleaning business HappyCleans, so for the duration, I essentially worked two full-time jobs. I worked my regular job by day, and on breaks, lunches, and any time I could, I worked on my new business. When I went home, I continued working until late into the night. 

It felt like all I did was work. Luckily, my new job was primarily done online, but that did not make it any less stressful. I was very tempted to quit my day job but eventually waited until I was generating at least half of the salary from my day job – this took an entire year! 

Meticulous Scheduling

Every minute of your time needs to be scheduled when you are trying to get your new business off the ground. You have to squeeze meetings in at all hours of the day or evening. If you have some vacation time saved up, consider taking a day fairly often to schedule a day of meetings that can only happen during the day. Likewise, you have to schedule your tasks every day to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Your business cannot grow if you do not keep up with these tasks, and each startup will have a unique set of tasks you’ll need to map out. One thing that you may have to sacrifice is time with friends and family, but long term it will hopefully be worth it. I felt like I was neglecting the people I loved and I missed my friends and family. 

Your schedule should be committed to paper or a Google sheet, not your memory. We forget to do things all the time and remember at the last minute, or worse yet, completely forget something. Schedules require commitment, and so will your business. 

Finances 

I could not afford to leave my full-time job and invest money in my business. I had a little money saved up, but I did not have enough to live on and invest in my company. Finding investors can be a fantastic way to generate capital, but for young entrepreneurs grinding and just trying to set up a no-frills small business, this can sometimes be hard to accomplish. My cleaning business wasn’t some flashy startup, so I felt that I needed to rely on myself. The only alternative, and the one I took, was investing in my business with every spare penny I had by cutting out all extraneous spending and activities. Vacations only happened in my dreams, and most of them were about my business. 

Believe in Yourself

I knew that no one else was going to believe in me if I did not believe in myself. When things got tough, I had to keep going. Working for a year while I built my business was extremely tough going, so I do not want to sugarcoat it. It was even tougher when I took the leap and left my full-time job. I couldn’t do very much at all then as my salary had halved overnight. Any money the business made was reinvested in the business to help its growth. 

My savings was dropping rapidly, and there were many times I wanted to give up but I persevered. I had to continually research and work on the business to make it work. If I tested a marketing channel, I was very careful to not spend too much until I was sure of the ROI. Testing the ROI of a wide array of marketing channels and only focussing on the ones with the best ROIs is a good way to ensure your business won’t go broke. Burning money on negative ROI channels without any analysis could destroy your business.

Bottom Line

Your business is yours. Like mine, it was up to me and me only to make it work. I couldn’t quit my day job for a year and couldn’t take a salary for another year, but the freedom that comes with the independence of running your own business will be worth it in the end. There are still days that are extremely draining, but I am proud of what I have created. I would never give up on myself, so I cannot give up on it.