So You Want to Become an Entrepreneur.

“Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won't so you can spend the rest of your life like most people can't.”

I found this quote online from an unknown author and this is exactly what my life is all about: living a life that most people can’t as I am able to live my passion, travel the world meeting so many interesting and passionate people, and making a difference in the meantime doing this. However, becoming an entrepreneur is not for the light-hearted.

An entrepreneur is a person who is offering a new product and/or service under uncertainty and considerable risk. Note that the keywords in this definition are uncertainty and risk. If you acquire or take over an existing business with an established customer base and proven several years of cash flow, you are not really considered an entrepreneur but rather a small (or large) business owner.

Unlike an entrepreneur, as a business owner, it would be relatively easy to get a bank loan or a line of credit. I experienced that myself when I was starting my own consulting and training business twenty-five years ago as an entrepreneur; It took me several months to get a bank even to talk with me about a mortgage. At that time, it upset me as I thought that a person with a full-time job would be a bigger risk for a bank as they can be laid off at any time by any large corporation while an entrepreneur who has every incentive to keep his or her business going would be a much better chance of paying off the debt. But bankers think otherwise, and, if you consider the statistics showing that the majority of startups fail in the first few years, they are probably right.

So getting a line of credit was not going to happen. Fortunately, I knew that I was going to be downsized from my corporate job and while I still was on the payroll, I applied for 5 credit cards to have my $50k in start-up capital to get started. Yes, I took a considerable risk, also knowing that I had three daughters who were about to go to college but had full support from my spouse. We made it (barely) through the first year and broke even the second one, after which we could start paying back our debt. My spouse was particularly inventive with swapping balances between different credit cards to avoid paying the high-interest rates.

One of the reasons that people avoid starting out on their own is that “it is not the right time”, for whatever reason. I disagree; it is always a good time as long as you provide a product or service that people need at a certain point. As an example, I taught a seminar in Las Vegas a month after 9/11; the city was pretty much empty, and at night we could get first-row seats in one of the Cirque du Soleil shows for basically nothing. The seminar was filled to the last seat as everyone was anxious to get out. Similarly, during the COVID pandemic, many restaurants that switched quickly to take-out were very successful. In my case, I initially postponed our face-to-face training classes and eventually had to cancel them, but the online training that we provided proved to be more than making up for it, allowing us to deliver the same content at a much lower cost: No need for travel, renting conference rooms, printing hand-outs and handing out physical textbooks as everything was replaced with electronic media. Instead of the stress of not knowing what to expect in a remote location with regard to facilities, I walked upstairs in the morning to my office to deliver the training to a worldwide audience.

Anyway, this is how I got started, more about finding your right niche in the next article.

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