Signs You Might Be An Entrepreneur - Calendar

• Updated on: 2019-06-01
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Signs You Might Be An Entrepreneur
Table of Contents
You’re Not Thinking About Doing It
Signs You Might Be An Entrepreneur
Entrepreneurs are a unique group of people.  Yet, we have found that entrepreneurs seem to think differently. Entrepreneurs act differently. They achieve differently. If this sounds like you, then these are the signs you might be an entrepreneur. 
They’re not content to collect a paycheck, however big. Also, entrepreneurs won’t be satisfied with steady promotions and increased responsibility. It’s not enough for them to take charge of a project and see it through to a successful conclusion.
As long as they’re working for someone else, obeying instructions, seeking approval, reporting results, realizing someone else’s vision instead of their own, they won’t be happy.
They want it all.
Entrepreneurs want to have the idea. They want to create the organization. This group wants to hire the key personnel, set the targets, oversee the design, determine the marketing strategy, and plan the growth. They want to be able to sit back when it’s all over, when the product is built and the customers are happy, and say, “I did that.”
Entrepreneurs are Growing
They’re not alone. Lots of people would like to say that. According to the results of a 2014 survey by the University of Phoenix School of Business, half of all working adults in the U.S. either already own their own business or would like to own a business. That spirit seems to be strongest among the young. However, there was a study done in 2014 by “Easy Life Cover.”  It said the amount of new entrepreneurs for the last 10 years had been over 50 years of age and 1 in 3 people in the 55-64 age range. Other surveys have put the number of budding entrepreneurs among twenty-somethings as high as 63 percent.
But it doesn’t always happen. In fact, about one American in ten actually does own their own business and run it full-time. The rest of the working population continues to pull a paycheck and work for someone else.
The reasons for the gap between the desire to go your own way and acting on that wish are clear to anyone who has ever gone through it.
Numerous Challenges
Being an entrepreneur is hard!
It takes courage, commitment and determination. And, it takes knowledge and talent and connections. Being an entrepreneur takes bold decisions and an ability to bounce back when those decisions turn out to be wrong. It can take a long time.
We all have great ideas. This includes identifying gaps in the market, thought of products that people would love and wished that someone would deliver. That’s the easy part. On any entrepreneurial journey, that exhilarating idea is the moment that takes the least amount of time and effort. Entrepreneurs might have a dozen billion-dollar ideas before breakfast.
It’s not enough for an entrepreneur to be an original thinker. They also have to be unstoppable doer plus find people, employ them and motivate them. Entrepreneurs must raise the funds and be willing to risk the money they find. Then it’s about put in all the hours and mornings and weekends, and holidays they need to turn the vision in their heads into something that other people can see and use and enjoy.
The idea is the inspiration that makes up 1 percent of success. What remains is the perspiration and the organization. And,  there’s a lot of both in every successful business.
There is no greater challenge than creating and running your own business. And, for an entrepreneur, there is no greater satisfaction.
Takes a Unique Person
But, it’s not for everyone. It’s for people who were born to do it. They feel that uncontrollable drive to make something happen. They eventually embrace that urge and harness it.
The book is about what it actually takes to be an entrepreneur. It’s also about the passion that forces entrepreneurs to draw up yet another business plan. And, it reflects on the determination that has them preparing yet another product launch. It also describes the behavior patterns that entrepreneurs follow and the sacrifices they make to reach their goals.
We wrote it because we both meet lots of entrepreneurs—and lots of people who want to be entrepreneurs. We see them at the business conferences. They are also on planes wherever we travel. Also, we field questions from friends and relatives who are thinking of starting their own companies. Those people aren’t just looking for practical advice. They are also wondering what they need to do to create their own firm.
We’ve all seen people dreaming of running their own business. What would make them happy might be a different job, a smaller company, or a change of career. However, the stresses of being their own boss just wouldn’t suit them.
Sounds Like Us
And, we’ve also seen, people who might have struggled in school or in the workplace, start tinkering in their garage in their spare time, hem and haw for months and finally throw in their day job. Before anyone has noticed they’re running a booming company that they’re about to sell for a giant sack of cash.
We know those people because we are those people.
We’re both entrepreneurs. We’ve both created successful businesses and grown those businesses and later sold them for millions of dollars. This means we have also hired and developed, produced and launched, and marketed and grown. As entrepreneurs, we’ve both had great ideas, seen them blossom and then watched a few of them crumble when they turned out to be not-so-good ideas after all.
Yet, there have been mistakes (lots of them) that we’ve learned from. And, there were times where we wondered if we should throw in the towel. During these times, we came back and created something even bigger and better. We both have a list of fantastic, top-selling products and highly successful companies. And, we’ve both dedicated ourselves to helping other entrepreneurs rise to the top. Right now, we’re actively turning our startups into highly profitable, rapidly expanding businesses.
What’s in This Book
In this book, we take a look at the characteristics that make up the entrepreneurs that we’ve met and that define our own experiences and personalities. We found fifty of those characteristics and divided them into six categories.
Background explores where entrepreneurs come from. It’s those traits that separate an employee from an owner and a manager from a founder. They might come from family or exhibit themselves in college. These traits might be revealed in first jobs. Whatever the case, those signs are often there in the background. Every entrepreneur knows them.
No entrepreneur ever succeeds alone. The people who surround them and the way they relate to those people are often a good sign of the entrepreneurial success they’re about to enjoy.
Part 2 explores those personal relationships and what they mean for entrepreneurs.
Part 3 is all about you: your personality, character, ambition and drive. It takes a special kind of person to be an entrepreneur. In this section we look at what kind of person that is. Also, we explore how the way you think and act reveals the way you’ll work.
Running a business is the ultimate test of management, so Part 4 is all about process. It’s about what entrepreneurs do and how they do it. Entrepreneurs see the big picture. They don’t just take responsibility. They understand why someone has to take responsibility. The entrepreneur puts in place workflows that ensure that eventually.They’ll be able to take pride in their work and the eventual success it will bring.
Goals for entrepreneurs are very different from those of employees, even senior-level executives. Everyone wants to succeed. Everyone wants to reach the top, achieve all they can and win the respect of their friends and family. But, entrepreneurs want to change the world in a number of different ways. This is what we’ll explore in Part 5.
And, in the final part, while the lifestyle of a successful entrepreneur might include fast cars, secluded beaches and private jets, getting there often involves battles over power outlets in local cafes, piles of t-shirts and a home that’s as much an office as a place to relax. The way you live now says much about your fit for life as an entrepreneur.
How to Read This Book
The points in each of these sections aren’t meant to be checklists. No entrepreneur has all fifty points. Some may have done the exact opposite. Neither Mark Zuckerberg nor Bill Gates completed their bachelors’ degrees at Harvard, preferring to go straight into business. Warren Buffet has a Master of Science in economics and Jeff Bezos has two bachelors’ degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. Not fitting one of these points doesn’t discount your entrepreneurial ambition. There are always exceptions and you could be an outlier.
Every entrepreneur has some of these points. Each one of them has something to teach about what it takes to build, run and grow a business. As you read through the sections of this book, you might nod your head or shake it. However, you should always be filling your head with the parts here that can help you.
We hope that you will gain a better of understanding of the entrepreneurs who build our economy and become a part of it.
Part I – Background
Temper Thompson’s parents own a coffee shop. They’re happy running their own small business, working for themselves and serving their regular customers. They’ve always been helpful and loving and supportive of their son, but as he grew up, Temper wanted to do more than own a single café. He now runs his own business, selling online courses on Kindle Publishing. In 2016, when Temper Thompson turned 18, that business was bringing in around $30,000 a month.
Entrepreneurs come from a host of different backgrounds. Some were inspired to take up their own business after seeing how much their parents enjoyed their own independence. They were able to learn and be mentored by them. They grew up knowing the value of entrepreneurship .
Other entrepreneurs develop that urge for independence by themselves. This happens after seeing their parents hunt for work and battle under unappreciative managers. But, whether entrepreneurs are born or made, that drive can often be seen early. It’s there in schoolyard trades, sidewalk lemonade stands, and garage-based start-ups.
Often, that drive doesn’t work well within the traditional workplace. Entrepreneurs sometimes struggle while they’re learning the industry or building professional experience. Many entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates   failed to make it all the way through college. Others finish college but can’t hold down a job, while some struggle to show their skills on their résumés and interviews. For them, entrepreneurship is often the inevitable alternative to unemployment.
There are lots of different ways into the life of an entrepreneur. In this section, we explore some of the most common routes that take people into the world of their own business.
You Were Raised by Entrepreneurs
When Ralph Lauren’s daughter was six, he told her that he wanted to name a perfume after her. It’s the sort of thing that dad’s who own global fashion brands do for their little girls. Most would have been thrilled to see an elegant bottle of scent carrying their name in cosmetics stores around the world. Dylan had other ideas.
“No, thanks,” she told her billionaire dad. “I’m saving my name for something I make myself.”
Dylan Lauren is now the owner of Dylan’s Candy Bar, a chain of boutique candy stores with outlets in exclusive locations across the country. These include New York, East Hampton and Miami Beach. Its flagship store in New York City is a top tourist attraction and welcomes over 2.5 million visitors every year.
Dylan Lauren is not the only child of an entrepreneur who has gone on to build their own successful business. Tom Yeardye was a stuntman and actor who teamed up with Vidal Sassoon to create a chain of hair salons. Years later, his daughter, Tamara Mellon, recovered from being fired from Vogue to partner with a shoe designer called Jimmy Choo. Together, they created a fashion brand now valued at over a billion dollars.
When Jack Abraham sold Milo.com, a shopping comparison site, to eBay for $75 million in 2010, he was following in his dad’s footsteps. Magid Abraham is the founder and CEO of comScore, a two-billion dollar analytics company.
The leaders of successful businesses are filled with founders who are themselves the offspring of people who created successful businesses. A 2015 study called “Why Do Entrepreneurial Parents Have Entrepreneurial Children?” found that having parents who are entrepreneurs increases the probability of the children being entrepreneurs by as much as 60 percent.
Other Factors Count
Some of that success may be down to talent. The kinds of skills necessary to succeed as an entrepreneur—a sharp mind, a willingness to take risks, a cool head, drive and management skills—may be hereditary in the same way that height and eye color are hereditary. We take aspects of our personality from our parents in the same way that we might take our mother’s hair color or our father’s male pattern balding.
But researchers Matthew J. Lindquist, Joeri Sol and Mirjam Van Praag, who investigated the link between entrepreneurial parents and their go-getting children, found little difference in the success rates of natural and adopted children growing up in families whose parent ran their own businesses. You might have a better chance of inheriting an entrepreneur’s personality if your birth parents are entrepreneurs. However, success in business isn’t genetic.
Something else happens as the children grow up.
That something is likely to include phone calls and check-signing. Some of the success of an entrepreneur’s offspring can certainly be attributed to the ability of a rich parent to smooth the paths for their kids. Tamara Mellon’s seed funding came from her father. Dylan Lauren’s list of influencers includes fashion A-listers like David Beckham, Janet Jackson, Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama. These are people her father can call, but the rest of us can only read about in gossip magazines.
Certainly, when you have a rich parent who can pay your bill and save you the chore of pitching to venture capitalists. Also, it can connect you to the people who can give you expertise and influence.
Role Models
But, it’s not only about cash and influence. What really makes the difference, say researchers, is role modeling.
Children growing up in a household in which at least one parent heads their own business will see what running a business involves. They hear the conversations about design and marketing. The kids get to listen to the reasons behind the decisions that founders have to make every day. For the children of entrepreneurs, there is a business mentor who’s always available, never more than a phone call away, and wants nothing more than to see their children succeed as much as they have.
You could forget about reading the biographies of great business leaders. You’d have the life of a great business leader unrolling right next to you in real time every day.
That’s a huge advantage, and it’s only available to the children of entrepreneurs.
If one of your parents is an entrepreneur, there’s a great chance that you’re going to be one, as well — not just an entrepreneur yourself — but one as successful as your parents. You can learn from them, seek their advice and copy the strategies that they’ve implemented.
Personal Experiences
However, if neither parent is an entrepreneur you can still capture some of those entrepreneurial benefits and thoughts through other types of activities for which your parents are participating. An example might be seeing a parent get up everyday and go to work no matter what. Entrepreneurs tend to need that type of mental dedication to work.
My mom (John) worked with the board of a charity for a children’s hospital. The commitment took work nearly every day of the year for 25 years. She had us (her children) run all over the city to pick up needed items and deliver others. We worked in the background of the major fundraising event of the year. My mom also worked another charity that took one full day every week and she spoke at an event once a month that required visual aides. And, there was no PowerPoint in those days. Guess who helped with the visuals for that?
The case with neither of our families being what would be called a traditional entrepreneur doesn’t mean you don’t have examples you can draw from. We both had hard-working parents that encouraged us to start working for money at an early age. This meant paper routes, lawns and lemonade stands, followed by getting outside part-time jobs as soon as we could, (and still keeping the paper route on the side).
Lessons Learned
So, besides both of our parents having a strong work ethic, they instilled other things in us. This included how to save and spend money wisely. We were both taught to always be looking ahead for opportunities to make money – and what a difference a good income can make in your life. Also, we could what can happen in terms of both the benefits and the risks.
Even if you have no entrepreneurial family members, you can still become one by reaching out to others. Find a mentor. Get close to an entrepreneur that you admire. Then, ask if you can pepper them with questions and seek their advice. If you can use your contacts to find someone close that’s even better.
Although the chances of being an entrepreneur are higher if your parents are entrepreneurs themselves, not every son and daughter of a founder wants to go into business. Some might want to be doctors, lawyers, designers or writers. And parents who are not entrepreneurs also have skills and knowledge that they want to pass on.
If your parents are entrepreneurs, there’s a good chance you’ll be an entrepreneur. If they’re not entrepreneurs, find a mentor and entrepreneur who wants a protégé and use them as a sounding board to add business knowledge to the love and support you get from your parents.
You’re A Drop-Out
The announcement made at Techcrunch Disrupt in 2010 was an earthquake. The event is meant to overturn convention and change industries. It’s designed to launch young technology entrepreneurs, throwing funds at them and putting them on a path to the “Three Comma Club.” But, when investor Peter Thiel stood up and announced that he would be giving $100,000 each to twenty entrepreneurs under the age of twenty provided they dropped out of school, gave up on college and used the money to build a busines it was a giant poke in the eye to the education establishment.
“Don’t bother with college,” he was telling young entrepreneurs. “It’s got nothing to teach you. Stop wasting your time and go build your company.”
It’s a message that many of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs have delivered — not with a speech — but with their feet. Both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg gave up places at Harvard, the world’s most prestigious university, to take a risk with companies that could have failed. They both became billionaires.
Steve Jobs failed to graduate from Reed College, a small liberal arts school where he ended up auditing typography classes as he played around with computers and dreamed of launching Apple. More recently, Blake Mycoskie, founder of Toms Shoes, left Southern Methodist University after an injury stopped him playing tennis. He launched a campus laundry service that racked up more than a million dollars in sales before he sold it and started his new company.
Some of the world’s great business-builders didn’t even finish high school. David Karp, who sold Tumblr to Yahoo for over a billion dollars, left school at fifteen. Richard Branson lasted only a year longer. Kirk Kerkorian gave it all up in the eighth grade before going on to buy a chunk of land in Vegas and own large stakes in properties including the Bellagio, Luxor and MGM Grand.
Things to Consider
If you’ve gone to college, become disillusioned and the books to launch your own firm, you’re in good company. There’s no shortage of founders of enormous businesses and other business talent who have gone on to do great things. Do note, however, that the non-college education trend has become less successful in recent years. In our own experience, we have found that many talented successful individuals not having a college degree has not been the end of the world for them.
It is surprising how many times that little piece of paper that says you graduated from university will open doors for you when nothing else will. If you don’t have that opportunity for a university education, or you don’t want it, you can still get out there and prove you can build something without having to spend hours in the classroom. The most important action for an entrepreneur is to be out there, pounding the pavement, using street smarts, and experiencing what the real world has to offer.
However, it’s not quite as simple as saying some entrepreneurs can’t or don’t complete college or that if you want to build a successful business, you need to give up your education. In 2014, LinkedIn’s Data team took funding data from Crunchbase and analyzed the demographics and relationships of more than 1,200 tech entrepreneurs whose companies had managed to raise money the previous year. What they found suggested that, if you were looking to raise funds for a tech company in 2013, it paid to not only complete college — but to attend a good one; then after university to first work and build experience at a large firm; and to wait until you’re in your thirties before going cup-in-hand to investors.
Most of the VC-backed entrepreneurs had listed a college education on their LinkedIn profiles. Nearly 30 percent graduated from a top-tier school like Stanford, MIT or Harvard. A similar percentage had worked for a company with a market capitalization of more than $50 billion, and 40 percent had worked at director-level or higher. A fifth had founded a previous company and the amount of first round funding raised increased as the age of the entrepreneur moved through their thirties.
Other Considerations
So, if you’re studious and committed to your studies or if you lacked the confidence when you were in your early twenties to break out on your own, you may still be not just an entrepreneur, but a successful one with a better chance of persuading a venture capitalist to open his wallet. Top entrepreneurs who did stick around at school include Jeff Bezos who picked up two bachelor’s degrees from Princeton; Nick Woodman who studied visual design and creative writing at the University of California at San Diego before creating GoPro; and Jennifer Hyman, co-founder of Rent The Runway, who completed both her bachelor’s degree and her MBA at Harvard where she also met her business partner.
The willingness of some top entrepreneurs to give up a good education tells us nothing about the value of education. It tells us everything about how entrepreneurs see risk.
In an interview with the BBC, Bill Gates explained his decision to leave Harvard as an easy one to make and an easy one to explain to his parents. He and Paul Allen felt that as they were studying an opportunity was opening in the new computer industry, and they were going to be left behind. “And it wasn’t as though Harvard wouldn’t have taken me back,” he added.
If Microsoft hadn’t landed some early deals, if IBM hadn’t started using Windows in its machines or if Apple had devoted as much time to software as it was dedicating to hardware, Bill Gates could simply have returned to Harvard and continued his studies, a little more experienced and a little better able and ready to face the world upon graduation.
Making a Choice
Entrepreneurs make difficult decisions every day. They have to decide how to invest their resources, which features need to be cut to bring the product out on time, and which benefits to emphasize in their marketing. They have to choose personnel to lead projects, define corporate messages and make deals with partners, suppliers and distributors that will make or break the company. The choice to forego parts of an education is just one decision that an entrepreneur has to make. What makes someone an entrepreneur isn’t the difficult decision they make, but their willingness to make it.
Though we can all name that handful of incredible, famous, and not-formally-educated entrepreneur what are the other entrepreneurs doing? Well, most of them have gotten their education and finished university. We both finished college. I (Joel), while a seasoned keynote speaker, have surprisingly never used my degree in Speech Communications from University of Illinois to secure a job. So have our degrees helped us be entrepreneurs? We can’t say for sure. The actual studies didn’t really help, but here is what did help — life experience interacting with people as we made our transition into the real world. We learned what productivity looked like.
Seeing Both Sides
We discovered who the movers and shakers of the future were. This included observing our professors and asking if they gave ludicrous and absurd amounts of homework.  Was it a waste of time? Well, an entrepreneur learns really quickly at college that they want to be the boss. Is that a waste of time? An entrepreneur learns really quickly at college how to work and how to “please” the professors to get the grade. Is that beneficial for business? You may want to ask yourself, who will you be pleasing as an entrepreneur? Not just yourself. You will have customers who want something different from your product or service. Plus, you learn how to iterate and pivot to save your business.
There is an incredible entrepreneur we know. No one has it together like she does. Her business is worth a lot. She may not exactly be Elon Musk, but she has achieved very close to that sort of accomplishment personally, professionally and financially. With two Ph.D.s. she believes education is so important that she has set aside a million dollars (separately) for each of her grandchildren. Her grandchildren will receive Their inheritance upon completion of a higher degree than a Bachelor’s Degree. Dropping out doesn’t mean you are going to succeed or fail as an entrepreneur. But, it sure could be a sign that you were made for something different.
You’ve Been Fired
There are few moments worse than when a head appears around the office door or over the top of the cubicle, and you’re called into the manager’s office. You know what’s coming. It’s in the manager’s eyes, the way they shift in the seat, and the way they try to avoid looking at you.
You know you’re being laid off.
They’ll give you a reason. The company is in trouble and has to make cutbacks; you haven’t met your targets; your position is being phased out; they just don’t think the job suits you.
It’s always painful. It doesn’t matter how little you liked the job, how much you might have complained about it, and how often you might have dreamed of walking into that very office and telling your manager where he can stick his job. When the rejection is aimed in your direction, it hurts.
The only moment worse is the one that comes when you return home and have to tell your family that your job’s gone. That hurts even more. Been there. Done that.
Happens to Everyone
But being fired is a part of life. It’s a part of life that even many of the most successful people in the world go through at some stage. Oprah Winfrey had what she thought was her dream job reading the evening news on Baltimore WJZ-TV. That was until she was canned for becoming too emotionally involved in the stories she was describing. She was moved to daytime television, a shift that she saw as a step down until her ratings went through the roof.
Anna Wintour was fired from her position as a junior fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar because her shoots were seen as too edgy. She went on to become Vogue’s most iconic editor. Even Walt Disney was shown the door at the Kansas City Star on the grounds that he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”
All of those leaders used that one step back to give themselves a more powerful run-up before their next great leap towards the success they were destined to enjoy.
Other leaders have been fired after achieving success. Whenever entrepreneurs accept money from investors, they give themselves bosses. They have people who monitor what they do, and hold them  accountable. They’re no longer entirely free. The corporate world is filled with entrepreneurs who set up companies, built them, took them public and were then ousted in a boardroom coup.
Lessons to Be Learned
Steve Jobs called being fired from Apple the best thing that could have ever happened to him. “It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life,” he said. He created NeXT and Pixar before returning to Apple, a little older, a little more experienced and better ready to take the computer company in a whole new direction.
Sandy Lerner, one of the founders of Cisco, got that office call shortly after Don Valentine bought 30 percent of the company for $2.6 million. Shareholders kicked Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie out of Research in Motion, makers of Blackberry phones and the company they had founded. They’ve since become leaders in quantum computing and quantum physics.
No one is immune from being fired. From the President to the pizza delivery boy, anyone can find themselves out on their ear at any time. Even if you don’t have a boss and have managed to avoid the supervision of shareholders, the moment you forget that disappointed customers have canned more entrepreneurs than any manager in history has or will, is the moment your position starts to wobble.
And, customers don’t write severance checks.
A Beginning
Being fired is never just the end. We’re all put on this planet for a reason. We all have our own roles to fill and our own goals to achieve. We might all want to run the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl but that’s not an achievement that we’re all going to enjoy. You might think everyone wants to be the regional sales manager for your current employer, but if it’s not happening, you have to ask yourself whether it’s really the job for you. Whenever we try to put ourselves in a position that’s not the one to which we’re best suited we’re only going to feel rejection and disappointment.
Being fired is always a powerful message that you were heading in the wrong direction. In the short term, it might be painful. But those difficult months will pass. In the long term, you’ll look out of the window on the top floor of your own office building one day and realize being fired was the best thing that could have happened to you.
Learn more about some of the times where I almost got fired and what I did to fix the situation at www.selfemployed.com/book/ .
No One Will Give You A Job — And That’s Just Fine
When Lisa M. Blacker left medical school, she couldn’t find any job let alone one in her field. Writing on Entrepreneur.com, she explained that she did what “any entrepreneur would do,” and started her own business. She consulted for her former schoolmates and taught them how to market on social media.
That shift from jobseeker to entrepreneur is not unusual. More than eight million jobs were lost during the Great Recession. As workers were receiving their pink slips and jobseekers were struggling to find positions, the rates of entrepreneurship spiked. According to a 2013 study based on data supplied by U.S. Bureau of the Census and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of new businesses that opened in 2006 (the year before the recession) fell. That number rose in 2007, shot up sharply in 2008 and peaked in 2009 to reach a figure 17 percent higher than in 2006. The pattern of rising entrepreneurship matched the rise that occurred between 2001 and 2004 after the dotcom bust. Across the 250 metropolitan areas the study examined higher local unemployment rates correlated with higher rates of entrepreneurship.
Jobseekers struggle to find work for all sorts of reasons. Every résumé that racks up a rejection feels like a personal blow. Every interview that results only in a handshake and a “Thanks for coming” sounds like someone saying, “Yeah, we don’t think you’re as good as you  think you are.” We all know that rejection is a part of life. We all know that everyone has the door closed in their face sometimes, that even the most successful people in the world will have applied for a job, pitched for funds, or demonstrated a product only to be told that the company thinks it’s found someone or some company that’s better. Knowing that rejection is inevitable doesn’t make it any less painful. Rejection always hurts.
A Different Perspective
It’s what happens next that makes the difference between an entrepreneur and everyone else.
Someone who has no desire to open their own company, no drive to take their own ideas and run their own business goes in one of three directions. Most persist. They keep sending out their résumés, asking friends on LinkedIn and browsing the wanted ads. Eventually, they land a position that enables them to pay the bills. For graduates who enter the labor market in a recession, it can take as long as a decade before their earnings reach the levels of people who graduated in better times.
Other jobseekers take temporary or part-time work. They move from the unemployed to the underemployed. You can see them greeting shoppers at Walmart and helping out at mail sorting offices in the run-up to Christmas. These aren’t jobs that give teenagers independence and their first paychecks.These are tasks that fill a financial need for people who have the skills and experience to do so much more.
It’s only better than the third way out, which is to give up. Over the last thirty years, even as medicine has advanced and legislation has made it harder for businesses to refuse work to the disabled, applications for disability benefits have reached record levels. In 1985, when the unemployment rate was a little over 7 percent, fewer than one eligible worker in a hundred applied for disability payments. In 2010, when the unemployment rate almost touched 10 percent, the percentage of workers claiming that they were too ill to ever work again had doubled. Some 14 million Americans now collect disability checks from the government instead of a pay check from an employer.
Doing it Differently
Clearly, some of those people will have needed help in any era. But when disability applications rise and fall in line with unemployment rates, it’s clear that many people who struggle and fail to find work give up. They give up on life, and they give up on themselves. They decide that they’ll never again receive a job that they can do, and settle for a life of no achievement and minimum and often a devastating income.
For entrepreneurs, that never happens.
In a thread on Reddit about the difficulties of job seeking, one user described himself as the “un-hirable man.” Ten years in a band had left him with no education, no work experience and tattoos on his hands and face. He set up his own restaurants, took the advice of Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and now describes himself as “rich.”
Another user described being an unemployed single dad in 1994, looking after his four-year-old daughter. Stuck at home, he started playing with computers and the Internet. He began an SEO business, moved into paid search and twenty years later employed 150 full-time workers. When the student visa of one of his employees was about to expire, his company sponsored her, enabling her to remain in the country instead of returning to Africa.
Inspiration
Even entrepreneurs who should have little trouble finding work discover that their entrepreneurial spirit can kick in when they fail to land exactly the job they want. A report in Business Insider described how Daniel Saks struggled to find work at a Wall Street bank despite having a degree in accounting and finance from Harvard University. The recession was well under way when he graduated in 2009. The banks that would have previously guaranteed him a lifetime of high earning were laying people off, not taking people on. Even the 100-year-old furniture firm owned by his family had just closed down. Instead of settling for underemployment and taking a job that didn’t offer him the challenge he wanted, Daniel set up AppDirect, a software company that makes app marketplaces. By 2015, the company was valued at $600 million.
Jobseekers need to prove to an employer that they have the skills necessary to successfully perform a specific task. But entrepreneurs have skills that enable them to build their own success. They have drive and vision as well as solve problems.  When you have those life skills, you don’t need to impress an employer; you are the employer.
You Had a Lemonade Stand — And Tried To Sell The Franchise Rights
When he was 15-years old, Richard Branson’s headmaster suggested that he and his friend Jonny Gems set down their views about education in the school magazine. Branson wasn’t keen on the idea. He believed that the schools’ opinion about corporal punishment, compulsory chapel, sports and learning Latin were too radical for The Stoic. He wanted to set up his own publication that would tackle issues common across different schools.
That’s where the ambitions of many bright students often reach. They think about creating their own newspaper or magazine, and they plan the sections they want to include. That’s often as far as they go.
The kids who are entrepreneurs actually do it. They write the stories and persuade their friends to contribute their own. It’s not surprising that the teenager who would soon launch a mail order business, then a record store before going on to open an airline and run a railway, picked advertisers from the telephone book, wrote to a newspaper chain about distribution and produced a real business plan for his kids’ newspaper.
Starting Young
We can often see entrepreneurship early in life. People who have that drive to build something great, construct a company, offer a product that other people want, and make their own money tend to show that drive early in their lives. Temper Thompson started online marketing when he was in eighth grade. Determined to make enough money to pay for his own video game habit and unwilling to ask his parents for cash, he set himself the goal of earning $100 a month. The courses that he was selling about Kindle publishing were earning him $360,000 a year when he was just seventeen.
Other teenage entrepreneurs include Leanna Archer who first turned her grandmother’s hair pomade recipe into a line of natural hair products when she was nine years old. Robert Nay was fourteen when he taught himself coding, wrote Bubble Ball and generated more than a million downloads within two weeks of launch, knocking Angry Birds off its perch as the App Store’s most downloaded free game. Nick D’Aloisio was just seventeen when Yahoo bought his news summary app Summly for $30 million.
Making Lemonade from Life’s Lemons
In my own experiences as an entrepreneur, a severe accident that crushed my foot and ankle on a construction job site took away my ability to walk. While I was bed-ridden, my entrepreneurial spirit took over and I taught myself everything there was to know about Internet Marketing. I spent hours studying the market and learning how it all worked. This helped me start what turned out to become a seven-figure blog. It was this drive and determination at a young age that fueled entrepreneurial success later on. While it wasn’t my first attempt at a startup business, it was the most advanced and one that I built from my original paper route and lemonade stand early days.
It seems the most traditional first business has always been the lemonade stand. It is simple to set up, easy to understand and fun to manage.For any parent, there are few moments more inspiring than watching their child start to fantasize about the money they’re about to make. It’s their first contact with being an entrepreneur — and they’re thrilled! They listen when you explain about the costs of the cups, the lemons and the sugar.
Local news outlets, though, are now filled with stories about the police shutting down pop-up businesses that breach local laws. In the summer of 2015 they even came for Jerry Seinfeld. Or rather for his wife, Jessica, who had set up a lemonade stand in East Hampton to raise funds for a charity that helps families under financial strain. The police, acting on a neighbor’s complaint, informed her that local codes in East Hampton Village forbid all peddling on village property.  Lemonade stands have now bumped up against local codes requiring business permits, peddler’s permits and food permits, so often that campaigners declared August 10, 2013 — Lemonade Freedom Day.
All Types of Choices
It’s possible to exaggerate those incidents. We hear when a lemonade stand is broken up by big guys with nightsticks. What we don’t hear when a couple of kids get through a few gallons of lemon water and sugar undisturbed is how they earned enough to buy themselves a new video game.
And these days, kids have more choices. Apps like Hopscotch, Scratch and CodeMonkey are teaching children to become geeks before becoming teenagers. But, acquiring those coding skills is one thing. Turning them into a business is much harder. A 2009 study by the Pew Research Center found that just 4 percent of people aged between 16 and 29 are self-employed. The median age of first-time entrepreneurs is actually 43. This is a time when skills and experience have been built up, networks connected, and some capital accumulated.
If you skipped the lemonade stand and went straight into the workplace, don’t sweat it. You might not be the next Richard Branson, but record stores aren’t what they used to be either. These days setting up a business can take a lot more than a business plan and a bag of lemons
 It Takes a Village
No one ever builds a business alone. They look for partners to help them get started and see them over the obstacles. Freelancers and staff complete the tasks that they can’t do or to do them faster so that they can focus on the tougher jobs that they have to do alone.
Mostly, they surround themselves with people who can supply the emotional and intellectual support they need. Entrepreneurs have families who understand the sacrifices necessary to turn an idea into a business.
They might be introverted or extroverted. When they need to, they’re capable of turning on the charm, talking with passion about their business and listening with clear interest to other people’s stories.
Entrepreneurs know that not everyone gets it. They understand that some people will always try to bring them down or hold them back. Not everyone will believe in their idea. Those that do believe in the idea won’t always think that they’re the right person to make it happen. People can be destructive and cynical as well as supportive and helpful. Successful entrepreneurs know how to filter out the envious and the negative from the positive and the encouraging.
You Put Your Business Before Your Family
The biggest difference between an entrepreneur and an employee is the hours they work. Or, rather, it’s t he way they count the hours they work .
Ask any employee how many hours they put in each week and they’ll be able to give you pretty good ballpark figure. Someone who clocks in and out every day might know that they do exactly forty hours. An executive who’s paid by performance rather than by the numbers on the counter might come to a figure closer to fifty or even sixty hours in a week.
But, ask an entrepreneur how many hours they work and you’ll just get a funny look. You may as well ask them how many hours they spend breathing. For entrepreneurs there is no difference between living and working. The business fills every hour available. When they’re not in the office, they’re working at home. When they eat, their mobile phone is a steady serious of pings and miniature stats sheets. Even when they’re driving, the one moment they can’t look at a screen, they’ll either be managing phone calls, listening to podcasts, or thinking about all the tasks they have to do. For an entrepreneur, they wouldn’t have it any other way.
More to Life
Except that life isn’t work. Life is also all of the other things that give us a reason for doing the things that we do. One of the first things that happens when you set up your own business is it fills up all the space available.
When that means you spend less time on the surfboard or watching television, it’s a pretty good exchange. You’re swapping one fun activity for an even more enjoyable and valuable activity. However, when it means you’re spending less time with your partner or your family, it’s not just you making the sacrifice.
Your partner gets to see less of you and has to do more of the household chores that you’re too busy to pick up. Your kids have one fewer play partner, and soon feel that they don’t have first place in your heart. For an entrepreneur with a family, the sacrifices go beyond money and beach time and security. They’re serious and they hurt.
Sacrifices
Rand Fishkin, CEO of Moz, described what those sacrifices look like in Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur. His long work hours didn’t give him the time to sleep or rest or recover from illness, so a minor cold hung around for seven weeks. His back pain was near constant and required him to walk with a cane. A “vacation” was a day on which he worked for less than four hours, and the longest he had ever gone without checking email was 40 hours. He even skipped his honeymoon to make sure that he didn’t miss any time at work.
The effect of that dedication can be severe. In her book, For Better Or For Work: A Survival Guide For Entrepreneurs, Meg Hirshberg describes a business seminar led by her husband Gary Horshberg, Co-founder and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt:
“As he spoke about the struggle and privation of Stonyfield’s early years, the entrepreneurs in the audience redirected their attention to me, sitting among them. Many had tears in their eyes. ‘How did you survive as a couple?’ they wanted to know. Soon the tales of woe came spilling out. ‘My husband left me.’ ‘My wife divorced me.’ ‘My mother’s not speaking to me.’ ‘My kids barely know who I am.’ ‘She’s risk-averse; I’m a gambler.’ ‘He thinks I care more about the company than I do about him. Sometimes I worry that he’s right.’”
Those are high prices to pay for setting up your own business and every entrepreneur can relate to them. Putting your business ahead of your family may be natural. It may even be inevitable. But it doesn’t come without a cost, and it’s not just the entrepreneur who pays.
Ways to Make Changes
There are things that you can do to lower the price. Entrepreneurs often leave room for one pressure-releasing activity such as taking a run or going to the gym. Pick an activity that you can do with your partner, and you’ll keep one thing that you do regularly together. Set strict limits on your work hours and you can improve productivity and prevent work from expanding to fill the time available. Rand Fishkin improved his work-life balance by seeing a coach who advised him to be home by 7pm and not touch work until the following morning, something he had never done before.  He also planned to take a ten-day vacation during which work would be limited to no more than one hour a day… and would be monitored by a timer. Weekends would allow work on just one of the days and also for no more than an hour.
He also learned to say “no” to many of the projects and tasks he might have been willing to accept in the past. That might have been his smartest move. Part of the process of learning to run your own business is understanding the need to delegate, and you can delegate almost every part of your business. What you can’t delegate is time with your family.
It also helps to have a partner who is an entrepreneur and who understands the struggle plus can roll their sleeves up and help out. Building something together as a family also provides a way to strike a balance. Listening to family when they tell you to put work aside is also key — because they can help you take a break and be the voice of reason when necessary. Listen to them and don’t forget that they need you just as much you need them.
Looking to save two hours a day? Go to www.selfemployed.com/book/ for twelve tools that I use that allows me to save up to two hours each day so I can spend more time with my family.
And Your Family Supports You Anyway
Entrepreneurs might sacrifice time with their family, but they can’t be entrepreneurs with a family if their spouses, parents and in-laws don’t support that sacrifice — at least for a time. I call this beginning entrepreneurial period the parenthesis period, or the “bracket” phase. It is somewhat separate, and works better if you have the support on each end. That support comes in all sorts of forms but the biggest and the most obvious sign is the signature on the check.
According to a 2013 report commissioned by Babson and Baruch Colleges no fewer than 87 percent of new businesses receive early funding from friends and family. Almost half of backers are peers aged between 18 and 34, although many of them will be supplying free labor, a place to crash, or a room to run an office rather than money, their contribution saves a young business with no income expenses it can’t easily afford.
Even when companies turn to crowdfunding to bring in money, it’s usually the people they know best who contribute the first funds and spread the word.
Financial Support
The advantages of tapping friends and family are clear. The median contribution is $15,000 and total funding typically amounts to between $25,000 and $150,000 depending on the depth of the family’s pockets. Best of all, it’s fast. According to Basil Peters, an exit coach and angel investor, the “family and friends” round is usually completed within a couple of months.
Eight weeks after dreaming up an idea, then turning to the Bank of Mom and Father-in-Law, your business could be up and running, and building its first product.
It looks like an ideal solution. Your family loves you and wants to see you succeed. They trust you and won’t make the sort of unreasonable demands that a venture capitalist might make. They’re certainly not going to push you into bankruptcy if it all doesn’t work out and they don’t get their money back. When family members dig into their pockets to support your business idea, they’re not making a financial decision in the way the loan officer at the bank will do. And they’re not going to tear apart your pitch like a venture capitalist. They’re giving you the means to realize your dream, however unlikely that dream might look at the beginning.
But the convenience of taking financial support from friends and family comes with a price. These are people you’re going to be spending years with. You’re going to be taking their money, and putting it in a high-risk venture. And, because every new business is high-risk — then seeing them every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas, at children’s parties and at birthdays, you’ll have to (read get to) explain how the company’s doing and what you did with their cash.
Take a venture capitalist’s money, and if it doesn’t work out, you’ll never see that person again. Take money from family members to build your business and whether it works or not you will change the relationships within your family.
There are things that you can do to make that change easier. Basil Peters recommends focusing on fairness, alignment and governance. Family members who invest their savings in your business are entitled to a fair share of it and have the right to question the effort you’re putting in to turning their investment into a profit.  All investors should own the same type of equity, he argues, ideally common shares so that everyone has the same interest in the same result: an increase in the value of the company. And while the first board of governors will usually be made up of the founders who oversee the spending of that friends-and-family money, even at that stage, it’s worth remembering that when you try to raise the big bucks, you will need an experienced board of directors.
Of course, the support that a family provides to an entrepreneur isn’t just financial. It’s also emotional, and once you’ve got the money out of the way, that support is the most important. It’s also only available from family.
Other Types of Support
It starts with patience. The family of an entrepreneur has to understand that success might come overnight, but it can take years to actually reach that night. Those will be years in which they will hear constantly about the business, about its problems and about its advances. They live with that business just as much as they live with their spouse. So when an entrepreneur receives support from his or her family, it’s not just because they want them to succeed. It’s because they share their dream. They see the business in exactly the same way and are looking at the exact same vision. They understand that even if they aren’t in the office answering emails or designing the packaging, they’re still contributing to the building of that dream and can be as proud of that success as the spouse who dreamt it, and make the creation.
The support a family supplies to an entrepreneur continues with listening. Whether a business is large or small, it’s lonely at the top. There are things a founder will have on his or her mind that they can’t tell a partner or co-founder however close they might be. They can only offload them on a spouse and that spouse needs to lend an open ear. It’s not always about giving advice or offering solutions to a problem. The entrepreneur usually knows how to solve a problem. It’s about being available to offload a worry, lay the worry to the side and get the entrepreneur up and running again. A best friend can do this, but generally, family does it better.
Perhaps the most important support that an entrepreneur receives from family is the unconditional kind. It’s not unusual for a spouse to support a partner as that partner studies their way through medical school or law school but at the end of that process, there should be a high-paying job that will benefit both of them.
For an entrepreneur, the chances of failure are much higher. There is a good chance that the years of long hour, low pay and high stress that would turn someone else into a doctor or Wall Street lawyer could give an entrepreneur nothing but grey hair and boxes of unsold stock. When you have a family that understands the risks and is prepared for failure, there’s a great chance that you’re an entrepreneur, and a good chance you’ll succeed.
You Like People And People Like You
Just about every management book ever written can be summed up with the words: “Great managers don’t manage; they lead.” They inspire people. They spread their vision throughout their company and they give everyone the sense they’re invested in the project. When employees feel that they’re as much a part of the company as the entrepreneur who set it up and owns it, that company will succeed.
What makes the difference between an executive who leads and one who has to rely on management? It’s not something that you can see. It’s not something that you can easily learn, although there are coaches who claim that they can share the techniques. It comes down to something intangible, something you can’t measure.
It comes down to charisma. It’s all about relationships with people. We both thrive off of other people. Whether it is something I’ve learned or something they have shared with me that made me laugh or think, I love people, which is what has helped me to become such a successful connector in addition to an entrepreneur. That ability to be a connector and networker has propelled my entrepreneurial success.
An entrepreneur might be a businessperson. They might an engineer, a visionary or an outstanding salesperson. But an entrepreneur is also a “people person.” Entrepreneurs have charm. They cajole, inspire, scold, explain and communicate. They have to talk funds out of venture capitalists, deals out of major customers, loans out of bank managers, dedication out of employees, co-operation out of partners and reliability out of suppliers.
The main tool of a software engineer is the keyboard and the screen. A designer makes a living out of a drawing board and a color palette. A writer builds and creates by choosing the right words. The most important tool of an entrepreneur’s trade is personal communication: the ability to talk easily with anyone they meet, from a worker on the factory floor to a chairman of the board who once ran a Fortune 500 firm.
Interpersonal Communications and Charisma
The benefits of that communications talent come right at the beginning of the business. Small companies start with a single individual or a small group of friends but as soon as they outgrow the garage, the entrepreneur has to bring in help. For almost half of all businesses, that means turning to the people they know. In The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup, Noam Wasserman, an associate professor of Business Administration at Harvard University, notes that 49 percent of C-level and VP-level hires at startups are drawn from the CEO-founder’s personal networks. The more people that you meet, the more people you build a relationship with. And the more people you stay in touch with, the wider your choice of potential partners and employees.
Defining the characteristics that make up charisma isn’t easy. In a 2012 interview with The Economist, Olivia Fox Cabane, who works as an executive charisma coach for Fortune 500 companies, defines charisma as “a way to get people to like you, trust you and want to do whatever it is that you want them to do. It’s what gets people to follow you, or want to work with you, your team, or your company.”
In her book, The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism, she goes further. Charisma, she argues, can take four distinct forms: focus, visionary, kindness, and authority.
Types of Charisma
Focus charisma, she says, makes people feel as though they are being listened to and understood. Bill Gates has it and so does Elon Musk. It’s what makes a factory worker feel important when the chief executive asks what he does for the company, and listens when the worker tells him how he thinks it could be done better.
We usually see this kind of charisma more often in its absence. We’ve all met those people at parties who talk with one eye looking over our shoulder in the hope of spotting someone more important. They’re not listening and they’re not interested in anyone but themselves.
Visionary charisma builds belief. It enables a leader to inspire a disparate group to walk in the same direction and believe in a common cause. Outside the business world, it’s the glue that holds together cults and religious followers. For entrepreneurs, it’s the difference between another product and a leading product, between customers and evangelists, between users and fanboys. It’s what turns a venture capitalist into an investment partner.
Kindness charisma is rarer. Based on warmth and generosity, it makes people feel loved and wanted. It’s what’s turned the Dalai Lama and Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi into such respected figures. It’s more often found in politics where people are encouraged to donate and volunteer time than in business where people are paid and led.
Authority charisma may the most powerful of all, and its origins are in power itself. It’s projected through appearance: through clothing and body language, mannerisms and voice. It broadcasts confidence and that self-belief gives confidence to others. This is a form of charisma that should grow naturally with success. The more you achieve, the more confident you feel about your ability to continue to achieve, and the more confident others will feel in your ability to bring them a share of your success. It’s not always likeable but it is always unmissable.
Creating Charisma
None of these forms of charisma comes fully formed. You might start an entrepreneurial career with hints of some of them, enough to begin to pull people around you and to start moving. But as you advance, that natural charisma should spread and deepen. You meet more people, and those people want to know you and stay close to you. They listen when you speak, think about what you say and share your vision with their friends and contacts. Your requests are accepted and persuasion becomes a knock at an open door. The more you succeed in your communications, the more you understand how to communicate effectively. And the more your communications succeed, the more your business succeeds.
Entrepreneurs may start by liking people and they find that the people they meet like them too. But successful entrepreneurs soon discover that like can turn into trust, belief, inspiration and success.
Your Imaginary Friend Is Steve Jobs
When you set up your own business, you lose one really enjoyable aspect of working life: you say goodbye to the watercooler. When you’re the boss, you don’t get to rest an elbow on the top of the bottle and complain about your manager. You don’t get to stand around with an office mate and lay out why you think the company should be moving in a completely different direction. Those are privileges that only employees can enjoy.
As the chief executive, you have no peers. You might have a partner but you don’t get to make complaints and you can’t bask in that warm feeling that comes when you think you know better than anyone else.
You have to take responsibility.
If you think something in the company is wrong, it’s up to you to fix it. If you’re frustrated at the lack of progress in product development or market penetration, you can’t just complain and let off steam; you have to perform a review and build a new plan.
When you’re an entrepreneur, it doesn’t matter how big the company is or how many employees it might have on its payroll, you’re on your own. It doesn’t take long at all for an entrepreneur to understand that it really is lonely at the top.
That’s one of the reasons that business conferences are so important. Those get-togethers at which entrepreneurs learn about the latest marketing techniques or hear about big data are also opportunities for the owners of businesses to talk to their peers about the challenges of running a company. Entrepreneurs might not be able to hang around the watercooler but we can hang out at the bar at a business conference, and when you go to a business conference you’ll find plenty of people doing exactly that.
But, big conferences only take place a few times a year. They’re breaks, not part of the work routine. You can find mini-event communities for entrepreneurs, which may take place once a month, or even weekly — but it still means that for the rest of the time an entrepreneur works alone.
Leaders as Heroes
Rather, an entrepreneur works with the spirit of another entrepreneur they admire constantly at their side. At one time, that imaginary business friend might have been Jack Welch who increased the value of GE by 4,000 percent during his twenty years at the top. Chief executives running businesses in the eighties and nineties could have done far worse than ask themselves, “What would Jack do?” every time they ran into trouble or wrestled with a difficult decision.
Before the eighties, they might have worked with the ghost of Henry Ford looking over their shoulder or John D. Rockefeller. Every era has had its management heroes, and every entrepreneur has been able to feel inspired by them even if they’ve never met them or read the biographies so many of them publish after they hang up their ties.
For at least the last decade, that hero has been Steve Jobs. Search on Google for the terms “Steve Jobs” and “entrepreneur” together, and you’ll get more than 1.6 million results. Those pages will offer quotes and strategies, case studies and skills. If entrepreneurship had a patron saint, the face of the man in the black turtleneck would already decorate l