What Stage Entrepreneur Are You?

I was listening to a podcast the other day and a woman was describing her entrepreneurial journey. She was dissatisfied with her day job so she started a weight loss coaching business and had built it to the point where she had so many clients she was getting burnt out so she decided to design and market on-line courses so she developed two courses from scratch and offered them out. Today they are earning so much income that she rarely needs to take on coaching clients. Not an out of the ordinary story, we hear them often if we hang out in the small business or entrepreneur circles. What was extraordinary about this woman is that she did all this in 18 months.

We all hear about these amazing entrepreneurs. You know what I mean, they’re the overnight rags to riches stories that make the journey sound easy and fast. But was it really? I don’t doubt they exist but how do most of us get from here to there? We listen intently because we want to know their secret, what they did to get from zero to hero seemingly overnight in their business. How were these people, just like me, able to be so successful, so quickly. Did they just work harder than I do, did they know all the right people, did they pick a better product or service? I’ve since learned that the answer to those questions is almost always no. So I asked myself, what’s the real story. It took me well into my entrepreneurial journey to fully answer this question.

Here’s what I’ve learned and I wish someone would have told me up front before I started my journey. Would I have still jumped into entrepreneurship? Yes, absolutely. Would I have done it differently along the way armed with the knowledge of what was coming? Maybe, maybe not but I definitely would have been more comfortable with the journey and the challenges along the way.

There are 5 stages of entrepreneurship.

1. Discontentment

The first stage is Discontentment. Let’s paint a picture, you’re working your 9-5 job. You’ve been there a while, you don’t hate your job. It pays the bills, there’s donuts on Friday, in fact you used to really enjoy it but the simple truth is you’ve fallen out of love with it and as hard as you’re trying to get a little bit of that love back, it just isn’t coming. Why have you fallen out of love? It could be that it doesn’t challenge you like it used to, your boss is difficult, your coworkers are annoying, you don’t feel appreciated, you feel overworked, you don’t have the work/life balance you desire, you want to earn more money, take your pick. It doesn’t have to be a big thing, it almost never is, but something just isn’t working for you. It starts with a twinge of sadness and before you know it, you’re daydreaming during the day about the what ifs. What if I won the lottery? What if I quit my job and moved to South America? At some point, the could be’s and what if’s turn into something more, a feeling of unease at best or worse, a full blown case of depression at the thought of spending the rest of your working life doing what you’re doing. You start to feel like there has to be something better. You start to feel like you have to do something, anything to get out of this pit you’ve found yourself in. The feeling that you need to make a change is super clear, what that change is, is not at all clear.

That’s the Discontentment stage. It’s painful, sometimes long and absolutely necessary to give you the push you need to move onto stage 2. Let’s talk about stage 2.

2. Realization

Stage 2 is realization.  On my own journey I remember clearly the moment I crossed over from stage 1 to stage 2, from Discontentment to Realization. I was sitting at my desk in the middle of our large open plan workspace and there was a large TV in the room. Presumably to motivate the employees, it played a continuous loop of powerpoint slides with different topics. At that particular moment there was this slide showing with a bullet point list of ethics telling me exactly how to be a better person followed closely with the company values slide. And, as I was watching the company’s mission, vision and values slides scroll through I suddenly realized they were great but they weren’t my mission, vision and values and they never would be. It was in that moment that I realized the only thing I wanted to do was start my own business. It didn’t matter that I was in a well paying stable job, that I was nearly 50 years old or that I knew nothing about starting a business. I just knew I needed to do it.

That’s the realization stage. Sometimes it happens quickly, sometimes it takes a while to get to that point. For a lot of people the path to realization takes a lot of turns. They recognize that they’re not happy in their current situation so they start looking for another job in another company. They search for and possibly find another job and they’re happy for a while but eventually they start to feel the same way they did in their old job. And after a while they realize that the situation they really want doesn’t exist in the framework of corporate or private business. They’re looking to follow their own path. Getting to this point is scary. It’s scary to think about being your own boss and in charge of your own destiny.

3. Hope

Which brings us to stage 3 of the journey, Hope. So you’ve realized that you want to start your own business. You’ve got an idea on what kind of business that is. Chances are the business you have in mind is something that you love, maybe even something that you’ve done for a long time as a hobby. You know you want to be your own boss and you know you want to do something that has meaning to you.

So you jump into launching your own business! You’re probably still working your day job at this point and that’s a good thing. You have a financial safety net in place just in case the business doesn’t go exactly as planned. But your side hustle is off and running and IT FEELS GREAT! You’re figuring things out, you’re talking to people about the business, you’re making your own decisions, you are in charge. You know you’re on the right path and there’s no better feeling than that.

Pretty soon your side hustle starts to creep into your day job. It happens slowly at first. You make a call related to your own business during work hours or you slip out a few minutes early from your day job to meet a client for an evening meeting. You rationalize that you’re still getting your day job done and that you can handle both, and for a time, you can but the little snippets of time grabbed throughout the day to work on your side hustle increase and when you’re not working on it, you’re thinking about it to the point where you’re not able to focus on your day job. You realize that your day job is starting to suffer because of it.

This is the beginning of the end of stage 3. So you form an exit plan to leave when your side hustle gets to a certain point or maybe you just can’t stand it there one more day and you just jump, with no safety net.

4. Grind

Which brings us to stage 4, Grind. So you’ve done it, you’ve let go of your day job and you are now 100% in your own business. It’s freeing and a little bit terrifying. You may or may not be making money from your business yet, chances are if you are making money, it’s not much and definitely nothing approaching what you just walked away from. But you pour yourself into the business and things start to happen, you start to get clients. At this point it’s just you. You’re what they call a solopreneur meaning you wear every hat because there’s no one else but you. You’re working a LOT, probably more than you ever did in your day job. Since there’s just you, you’re the one personally delivering every service or product that you offer. This is actually a lot of fun in the beginning. It’s exciting to know that people want your service or product and you enjoy being able to deliver it to them personally. The business is growing but you start to feel a little burnt out, because in addition to delivering the service you’re also doing all the behind the scenes stuff, bookkeeping, administrative, sales, marketing, etc. You start to wonder if you made the right decision. This is a really tough stage. Your business is big enough to take up all of your time, and while it’s growing, it’s not yet big enough to financially allow you to hire help. I wish there was some way to skip past this stage because it sucks! Whatever you call it, paying your dues, building your business, the daily grind, it will take you to your limit and if you’re not careful, chew you up and spit you out. This is where most small businesses fail. It’s important to realize, before you get to this point, that you need to take care of yourself. It’s not ignoring your business, it’s actually the opposite, it’s ensuring your business doesn’t die on the vine after it kills you.

5. Balance

And that takes us to the 5^th and final stage of entrepreneurship, balance. In the grind stage you are working in the business, in fact you are the business. Like a newborn baby, it can’t survive without you. Stage 5 is where that baby becomes a separate entity. The business is growing and picking up speed. You are at a point financially where you can afford to hire help, hallelujah! You start by bringing in help to do the things that you never really liked doing before and probably weren’t very good at anyway. It frees you up to do the things that you really enjoy, maybe it’s the creative or hands on parts of the business that you’ve always enjoyed doing, the original reason you started the business. This is great but you’re also at a crossroads. You can be the worker in your business doing what you love, whether that’s making the cakes, building the houses or designing the graphics. And you’ll do okay, even very good but you are one person and you will be naturally limited by the amount of time in your day. This is fine for some people but I think most of us as entrepreneurs, want more. We’re builders by nature, we want to build our business and see it grow beyond us. To do that you need to set about working on your business rather than just in it. This involves putting processes, procedures and a personnel infrastructure in place. It means hiring the right people but more than that, it means setting up your systems so that even the not so perfect employees can succeed every time with every customer. As you go down this road the amount of time you spend working in your business will decrease and the amount of time you spend working on your business will increase. Until one day you realize that you’ve created a living, breathing, completely separate being. You can step away from the business and it stands on its own. This opens up a world of possibilities, you can travel, you can spend more time with family, you can sell the business, you can start another business and do the whole thing all over again.

So those are the stages. Discontentment, realization, hope, grind and finally balance.  It’s an amazing, difficult, exhausting, frustrating, incredible journey that only an entrepreneur at heart would take on.

Eliza is the owner of two successful pet related businesses; Preferred Pet Partners, a pet sitting and dog walking company, and The Pet Business Coach, offering coaching and resources to aspiring or current pet related business entrepreneurs. She maintains two awesome blogs. One for pet parents https://preferredpetpartners.com/blog/ and one for pet business owners https://thepetbusinesscoach.dog/blog-page/.  Eliza also supports various animal rescue and shelter organizations. Eliza, her husband, and their three pets live in Nebraska. Visit her websites: www.preferredpetpartners.com or www.thepetbusinesscoach.dog.