Entrepreneurship. For many of us it seems like the only way to have any sort of decent life for ourselves and our families. It’s something that’s talked about a lot in the men’s self-improvement circles and it’s something I’ve written extensively about myself. Even if you’re not an entrepreneur and have no inclination to be one it’s still important to have certain entrepreneurial understanding and skills that’ll help you succeed in the corporate world. A world ruled by politics, connections, and only little by skill.
There are many ways to succeed as a entrepreneur, many paths that you can take to get out of the 60 hour work week and away from the politicking and back with your family or your life. A combination of hard work, grit, but more importantly effectives sales and marketing will see you through to a relatively decent income, though with inflation, what even is a decent income anymore?
Nevertheless, the path to entrepreneurial success is open to those that’ll sit down, work hard, and study even harder to get their chosen business over the ground and flying. I’ve read countless books on this subject, written a few myself, and written probably over one hundred articles on the topic. And what I’ve seen time and time again is that there is a little part of this grand entrepreneurial journey that is forgotten over and over and over again.
The Bridge Between Starting & Succeeding
Let’s use selling fiction books as an example, a popular option for those looking to become entrepreneurial. It’s harder to sell your first ten books then to go from ten to one hundred books. It’s harder to sell your first one hundred books than going from one hundred to one thousand. And it’s harder to sell your first one thousand books then your next ten thousand books. Starting a business is sort of like rolling a snowball down hill. As it picks up snow and gathers, it starts to propel itself.
Now obviously there are plenty of boulders and trees that can smash that snowball to bits, even if big, but the more momentum it gathers the harder it is to stop. Many people have laid out system and guidelines on what to do once you get that snowball rolling. One you can it beyond palm sized and something you have to use two hands to roll. They’ll show you pitfalls and traps, they’ll show you paths to take so it keeps gaining momentum. You’ll learn all sorts of like things like customer retention, effective sales and marketing channels, best business practices, and so on and so forth.
However they seem to miss a very important part of the journey. And that is getting that snowball fist sized when there’s no damn snow around. Most books will tell you how to go from one hundred clients to one thousand but what about if you don’t have a single client? There’s a giant gap in the knowledge there. Why?
Well first off, it’s hard. It’s the hardest part really. Generating momentum when there’s none there to start with. Starting a fire as opposed to building it up. Another thing is much of our advice comes from gurus. Gurus who work with businesses that already have stayed afloat long enough to gather enough momentum to do something with. But they don’t work with those just starting out unless they have tons of spare cash to spend. And that’s something most of us just don’t have.
So What’s To Be Done
Which brings me to what I believe are best practices for becoming an entrepreneur. Start on getting money first. Now at first that sounds really obvious but let me explain. Don’t try to just “start a side hustle” that’s foolish in my opinion. It’s better to get into sales or something that can generate a decent dollar amount. Then use that for marketing which is the most important facet for starting a new business, granted the business is halfway decent. Get a decent job or live so cheaply that a halfway good job will still give you some money to spend. If I was starting over today here would be my plan.
Steps To Becoming Entrepreneur & Living Life Of Free (If I Could Do It All Over Again)
- Get into sales of some sort and live cheaply.
- While saving money from the above, read and learn all that I could about my chosen business of choice and best practices of sales/marketing/copywriting. Read books, take courses, listen to podcasts, cram for at least a year like it’s going to be a final exam. All while stocking away whatever money you can.
- Start ‘side hustle’ except now you’ll be armed with the two biggest things to make a business successful, especially entrepreneurship. Knowledge and money. Throw money into marketing. Track your ROI. Find best practices, learn all that you can about your target consumer, who wants you product, and why. Have an email list of customers that you stay in frequent contact with. And so on and so forth.
- Grow, profit, break free from the matrix, as much as is possible, and live a healthy balanced life most can only dream of.
Sounds simple when it’s put like this, and maybe it is, but it requires lots of hard work, time, and dedication. But it’s worth it in the end. But here’s the thing. Without the capital to support marketing, and marketing is what gets you that handful and snow, and takes you beyond that, you’re not going to be able to get going anywhere. You’ll be stuck with great knowledge of how to make a medium size snowball a large but no ability to do anything about it.
So get that cash flow first, stack it away, learn all that you can, and then go about turning your ‘side hustle’ into a genuine business that’ll support you and yours in the days to come.
If anything I said here helped you I’d recommend checking my books out on Amazon.
-Charles Sledge
