Are You in the Right Business?

You have tried hard at your business, put in all the efforts, done all the right things, and yet – success continues to elude you. Sounds familiar?

As entrepreneurs, it is only natural to question ourselves all the time. Very often, when the going gets tough, the natural instinct is to opt for flight over fight. When it comes to the question whether we are in the right business – well, that makes lot of sense.

A very successful entrepreneur once told me: it is not how smart or how hard you work; it’s being in the right business at the right time. Since he has a reported wealth running into the billions, I wasn’t about to argue.

It all boils down to knowing what you want and daring to dream – the two foundations of entrepreneurship. By now, you would have realised that skills and knowledge is not as important as passion and dream. The road to success is littered with people who are good in what they do as a profession, but fail miserably in business. Dream, on the other hand, is all about scale. It takes almost the same amount of work and know-how to operate a million dollar business as opposed to one ten times larger. So why settle for the first million? Similarly, if you have the opportunity to run a business that rakes in millions a year, would you start one that you have absolute passion over, but which would make only a fraction of the first? The answer is obvious.

However, to say that there’s a perfect business to be in, is nothing more than escapism. Some would say that you can’t ever become rich running a grocery. Well, for many years, Walmart was the largest company in the world – and yes, they are in the grocery business. Others would say that you can’t prosper as a tailor. Well, have you heard of Zara and the man behind it who’s now the richest in Spain? Some of my friends who run advertising businesses lament that it’s a dead-end business. Well, what business do you think Google is in?

The fact is – in almost every business, someone, somehow will come to redefine the business, dominate it and become a beacon of that industry. What was a dull, unattractive and unlucrative business become the total opposite simply because an entrepreneur managed to break the stereotype and prove the irrefutable rule of business: that there’s no ‘right’ business.

As such, instead of chasing that ‘perfect’ business, simply make yours perfect. Success indeed do come to he who is patient.