Start-Up Business Requires Tenacity, it’s not like a ‘New Years Resolution’!
There’s really nothing more annoying than watching a great business idea fall apart because the business doesn’t have the key ingredient…. someone with the tenacity to make it work.
Because what really amazes me are people who think that business is easy, it’s such an easy thing to do, just start a business and then it will make me money…. that concept just couldn’t be any further from the truth!
It takes sheer grit and tenacity to make a business succeed.
Business, especially a start-up business, is incredibly difficult. Because for a lot of start-up businesses, it is the person or people who are doing it, that actually makes it work. They are tenacious, never giving up, and want to be successful more than anything else. It’s those people who keep going when others would simply give up. These guys are business heroes.
The Pain Barrier
Just like an athlete who’s aspiration are to achieve better times but have fallen short for months by disappointment; the business owner has to overcome years of hardship and break even profit, sometimes working months and months without pay, before they reach their goal.
It’s their tenacity to work through hardship before they achieve their positive return that makes them continue on.
The start-up business pain can be felt for years, especially when you rely on retained earnings to grow. The self discipline of a self financed business growth structure, as a start-up, is a magnificent role model for business; somebody who truly has worked tirelessly to get themselves through the pain barrier.
The self gratification of such an achievement is something that only a few people will ever experience. But for whatever reason, it is addictive.
My story of breaking through the pain barrier made me want to taste the satisfaction again and again and again. It is definitely not about the money, money can’t buy the satisfaction that overcoming constant adversity feeds the soul.
Making Your Business a New Years Resolution
For many people, just taking a leap of faith towards starting a business is too much. But many of those people are happy to take on a New Years resolution that may last a few months. If that’s you, there’s nothing wrong with that; but if you really want to start a business or make a change to your life. If you want it bad enough and you know you have the tenacity to be standing through hard times, just do it….
What’s the point in wondering how things could have been, when you have the chance to relish the opportunity for making it what it is?
There’s no way that I will ever die wondering what things may have been like? That’s not for me, I am all about giving everything 100%, leave no grey areas or questions or doubt. It is what it is, sometimes you win and sometimes you fail.
But the most important thing is that you gave it 100% of everything you have to offer. You can’t be hard on yourself if you worked tirelessly and the business failed. Sometimes they do.
Be Smart not Stupid
It’s always best to consider the ‘elephant’ your about to step onto; business is no game, it is a serious decision that takes a courageous person in order to make it work.
Some business ideas are more creative than others and some have risks where others have minimal disruption. You need to plot out what the likelihood of success and failure is. Don’t be complacent enough to think that everything will be beautiful, it won’t be. Nothing is that easy:
- Where the business requires a market to start, you will have to keep your job, while working on your business until such time that the market is created;
- Where the business requires equity, you will have to hold in there (holding an alternative job) until you are financially balanced enough to make it work;
- Where the business has limited customers, you may have to relocate to a better foundation environment to sustain a proven customer network;
- Where there are risks, you will have to take the steps to minimise the danger;
- Where there are competitors, you will have to find a point of difference that creates a tenable business prospect.
It may even be the case of securing an agreement with your employer on the basis that if things don’t work out that you can take on part time employment until the business picks up?
Business is not a 3 Month Test Ride, it’s a Life Changing Decision.
That decision of either “having a go” or “making it happen” is the difference between being successful or failing from the start. Business is not a New Years resolution.
Written by Geoff Pike, Entrepreneur, Speaker & Business Mentor
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoff-pike-australia
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ABOUT GEOFF
Geoff founded a sole trader plumbing business in a remotely located and vastly underpopulated location in outback Australia. Starting business with only enough money to pay 4 weeks wages, Geoff persisted by growing the business into a multi-disciplined trade services company. Over a period of 12 years, the company Geoff established grew to employ a workforce of over 300 personnel covering an area almost half the size of Europe, receiving international award recognition with an annual revenue of over $30mil. Geoff knows what it takes to overcome adversity.