Passion

You cannot be half-hearted about your involvement, you have to face the slaughterhouse and give yourself to the cause you are after. 

Passion!

The best thing to do is to get this clear from the start; if you are intending to become an entrepreneur and to work on your ideas with so much passion, then you have to know that there will be a tremendous amount of work coming your way. There will be sleepless nights and frustrating times. It is best to your ‘mind set’ now itself before we go any deeper. The amount of commitment required of you especially in the initial stages of execution may take you away from your friends, family and some of the pleasurable activities you enjoy.

If you want to build something great, commitment and focus is required. You need to sacrifice the time and energy from other activities and focus it on your startup. Compared to the Dot Com era, we have a lot more entrepreneurs giving up their day jobs to focus on their businesses. They understand that this is a full time career and that they need to be there to build it up; to do the hard work before they can reap the benefits.

There are many who still continue to keep their day jobs as well. You may need to feed your family or have some stability while getting things going. This is fair enough, but sacrifices will have to be made on other fronts. Do understand that if you intend to go on an entrepreneurial journey, you will have to forgo or put aside your other career ambitions. It will not be easy to work on two massive paths at the same time. They are bound to clash and you will be really exhausted to focus your energy completely on making either succeed.

If you intend to run a small cupcake business from your home to make some extra cash on the side, then you could manage to do it while holding your day job. But if you intend to make a bakery franchise, or a company that has a reach of millions, then when the time comes, you will have to make that jump.

One advice we would give is to begin your planning and research whilst you are working. See if the project is feasible and would it be sustainable. You could even start experimenting and selling on a small scale. But once you are ready to start, then it would be best to go in full time. Be at the helm of the ship so that you(the captain) can steer it through the stormy waters, to its final destination.

Unless you have the passion, and unless you spend all your time on your start-up, there will be little chance of success. Having one foot in and the other foot out the door and doing a part-time job as an entrepreneur rarely works in the real world; you have to get both feet in the door. I am not saying it is impossible, but it is rare that such an approach will yield good results. Perhaps one can do this at the very early stages of planning a start-up company, but when it comes to executing and starting the company, there is no other way but to be fully immersed into it and to become the ENTREPRENEUR that is fully committed to the final outcome.