Most entrepreneurs we work with, including ourselves, have been building businesses for over a decade. Most are not working on the first business they started either.
Even if the concept you’re currently working on doesn’t shake out, the lessons, the networks, and how you respond to success and failure will compound into your next business, building an invaluable skillset.
Everyone starts as a ‘junior entrepreneur.’ No one knows what they don’t know about incorporating, tax law, and building a sales engine. Once you’ve mastered that, you merely move on to learning a different set of new skills. You shouldn’t expect to walk into your first company, even if it’s an industry you’ve been in for decades, as a senior entrepreneur. It will take time to get to that point.
The best thing you can do is set yourself up to learn. Find someone just one step beyond where you’re right now, someone who’s just solved the pain points you’re working through. Find a role model who built something solid from the ground up, and watch the thrifty ways they made it work.
Be cautious and prudent about your spending. Expect everything to take 2-3 times as long as you anticipate, and plan your finances accordingly. If you take a significant risk, make sure that decision has a higher payoff than a smaller risk might. Talking to future customers, refining your idea, and meeting new people in the space can feel like distractions from just jumping in. But it can also be an opportunity to pare down your business, help you see things more clearly, and help you watch where your competition steers wrong. Treat it as an experimental learning opportunity, and extract as much as possible before hardcoding business decisions that will be more difficult to change.
Every founder experiences failure, but you’ll fail forward if you act with integrity. People will notice if you’re doing the right thing and trying to create this business from a sincere place. The best connections we have from our failed startups are the ones who saw us fail, saw us act with integrity in that failure, saw us make things right, and who know we are going to treat the business with respect.
There is no such thing as overnight success when building a business. And we shouldn’t aim for that – fast fashion makes cheap clothes; overnight success makes cheap business. Hard work, commitment, integrity, pivots, experimentation, communication, and countless other variables exist. It’s hard work, but entrepreneurship is also the most fun job in the world.
