Greeting Steemit Family
Starting a business is never a small task, even though many people admire the businesses they see around town. You must make significant sacrifices to establish and run a successful business.
While we often admire a thriving business, we rarely take time to reflect on how it all began. Every time we see a running business, we get inspired to have or run something similar for ourselves. But what we usually fail to consider is how it started and the effort the owner put in to reach the level we are seeing.
We often think, I just need capital to start something like this. But from my little experience, I can confidently say: it’s more than just capital.
To build a sustainable business, you need to be ready to step out of your comfort zone. Yes, anyone can start a business, but not everyone will survive. That is why you must prepare yourself for the ups and downs along the journey.
You might have enough capital to buy all the equipment, secure a good workspace, and even hire workers. Some people even go the extra mile to invest heavily in furniture and decor just to make the space look top-tier and classy.
That is great. It will look impressive, and people will love to visit. But remember, what the client will take away and use to rate you will be your service, not just your setup.
Do not assume that you will have clients waiting at your door like they have been longing for your service. Statistically, most businesses in the early days ran on the owner's pocket. Now, the real question is How long can the owner sustain that?
Imagine running with low returns, but still ensuring everything keeps going, paying workers, and keeping operations afloat. That’s why they say the true test of a business is in the first five years. If your business can survive five years, then you are in a position not to give up. You are getting closer to stability.
In many cases, your first clients are friends and relatives who just want to support you. But over time, if you can not afford to pay the highly skilled staff you hired at the start, they will leave.
Then you may have to work with amateurs, which reduces the quality of your service. At this point, your business begins to suffer in ways that are not easy to recover from. You might even need to take out loans to keep things afloat, and that becomes another mountain to climb.
This is why you need a mentor in every sector you find yourself in. Sometimes your mentor does not need to be physically present. Just learn their story and understand how they went through the process to become who they are today.
In the tech world, look at people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and others. You have heard the stories of how they started small, sometimes alone, working out of their parents’ garage. Their stories show us one thing, they had a vision they were committed to.
Where I’m working now, we have a bigger space. But what many people do not know is that we started as just two people in a small room. We had one table and two chairs, sitting opposite each other with our laptops.
We worked like that for over a year before getting our first office desktop. At the time, I was using an HP laptop with an 80GB HDD and 512MB RAM. That laptop was heavy and even harder to carry around.
What I’m saying is, start small, but make sure you have what you need to push your vision forward.
It takes more than just investment for a business to succeed. You can gather a crowd to start with. But if that crowd does not carry your vision, it’s just noise. Build your team, and make sure they understand and share in the vision you are carrying.
This is something only an entrepreneur with five years of experience will truly understand. Those just starting might say I’m just playing with words.
You are the vision bearer. No one else truly cares about your vision the way you do. The people you start with are usually there for their own needs, not necessarily to help grow your business.
Look at big corporations today, they employ the best people. That’s possible because the vision bearers laid the foundation that allowed them to grow to that level.
Remember: Workers are there to perform a task and not carry your vision. So don’t admire the big names and then try to compete with them by hiring like them. Start your business wisely.
Cheers
Thanks for dropping by
@fombae
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