Entrepreneurship as a Career Option

So much gold in the panel discussion yesterday. I’ll try my best to condense my takeaways in a logical order.

First, the panelists:

To connect with the panel:

• Chin’s LinkedIn Profile
• Colby’s LinkedIn Profile
• Tiffany’s LinkedIn Profile
• MeltOn Sparks website

My high level message:

1. If you can’t find a job in this recession, why not create one for yourself.
2. Freelance/Gig economy vs. Starting a Business.
   • Instead of depending on others for income/having an inconsistent income stream, take initiative and become a provider yourself. It will require that you get comfortable with sales & finances, but it can also be much more rewarding if you do it right.
3. Main types of entrepreneurs:
   • Lifestyle – priority is “passive income”. Focus is profit.
   • World Changers – Not just about money, usually some greater mission/vision in-mind. Passionate about scaling and reaching as many as possible for their mission/vision.
   • Neither is right or wrong, and you can also be a mix. Knowing what type of business you want to build is important so that you end up designing it to meet your expectations.
4. Why be an entrepreneur?
   1. You control what you do & earn – You can never get laid-off or be fired, you’re not dependent on a manager for “promotions”.
      • Don’t be afraid to ask for money. Money is a fair exchange of value if you truly are delivering value to your customer.
      • Mindset shift required if you’re moving from being a “wantrepreneur” to being a serious entrepreneur – Instead of focusing on on-demand flexibility, focus on designing your business such that you will have predictable and recurring revenue.
   2. To learn and grow – there’s no faster and more intensive way to grow yourself than to throw yourself into the firey pits of entrepreneurship. It’s not easy, there’s a lot that you won’t know, but you damn well better be prepared to learn just about everything.
   3. Change from: Jobseeker -> Provider – Stop relying on others to sustain yourself, create the culture you desire, create a bigger impact.
   4. Leave a legacy – Create something that will outlast yourself, change the lives of your customers.

Insights from the panel discussion:

Work-life balance & time commitment

One of my favourite comments was from Colby, and I paraphrase here – “Worklife Balance is a misnomer, it predicates that work vs. life are antagonistic. You have ONE life, and work, family, personal, etc. are all a part of it”.

Instead of trying to find balance, embrace that being an entrepreneur will mean that you’re sometimes working on your business all the time. The more you fight it, the less you enjoy it.

That said, the message here isn’t that you should subscribe to the hustle culture and work all the time. Learn to compartmentalize so that you can spend quality time with your family, friends, by yourself as you need. Take good care of yourself, running a business is a marathon, not a sprint.

Personally, I find that taking up the mantel of entrepreneurship has made me a lot more productive with how I spend my time.

e.g. I’ll listen to podcasts while I drive/cook, I’ll meditate on business problems while I go for a stroll in nature with my son (though not all the time, I also know when to focus on spending quality time with him), I spend less time doing unproductive activities like watching movies, scrolling on social media, and playing games (not that I don’t at all, I still do, but in moderation).

How did you get started? How did you fund yourself at the start?

My favourite comment here comes from Tiffany – “I didn’t fund my business, I started my business because my business funded me”.

There is a misconception that starting a business requires a lot of capital and is highly risky. Don’t get me wrong, running a business involves risk, but there are ways to manage risk, minimize startup cost, and get to revenue quicker.

1. Run a lean startup.

I won’t go into too much detail here, read The Lean Startup by Eric Reis or Running Lean by Ash Maurya for some great insights on how to build and test startup ideas with minimal expenses & within shorter time frames. They both highlight the same concept/methodology:

The Lean Startup is more storytelling & contextual, highlighting many examples of how different companies have done it.

Running lean is more step-by-step and process oriented. Giving you a clear roadmap of what to do, how to do it, and when to do it.

2. Price for value

Many entrepreneurs tend to underprice themselves when they start, or worse, hesitate to make a sale and give things away for free. A common symptom of the Impostor Syndrome.

If you are really adding value to your customers, don’t be afraid to justify a fair exchange of value through what your solution is worth.

It’s also important to price based on value creation instead cost. In many cases, value creation may scale exponentially, while cost of goods/services may only scale linearly.

Ask yourself:

• How much money am I helping them save?
• How much money am I helping them make?
• How much time am I helping them save?

Brandon Sellers does a great job of outlining a rule-of-thumb for pricing in his blog post: 4 Steps to Finding Out if Your Startup Idea is Brilliant. Skip to the section on “understand the impact of these pain points” for a more detailed breakdown.

3. But I still need some small capital, what are my options?

Futurpreneur Canada is one such organization that provides entrepreneur-friendly small business loans. Isaac & Karen from MeltOn Sparks are a Futurpreneur recipient.

What about Investors? So much to say on this, but on a high level. It depends on how much you need, what you’re using it for, your plans for growth, and where you’re at with the business. I’ll just talk about the WRONG reasons to seek investor money:

1. If you’re still experimenting. Investors want to de-risk their opportunity by knowing that what you’re doing works and can create predictable outcomes.
2. If you need it for operations/to pay yourself/your team. While you can take a portion of the capital you raise and put it towards this, this should not be the ONLY reason you raise. Investors want to know that their capital is going towards GROWTH.
   • Because of that, investors typically won’t get involved if you’re raising <$250,000. They know it’s too little to be for growth and is usually more for operations/survival.
3. If you are building a lifestyle business. Remember, investors are looking for a return on their investment, it’s not a donation. Because of that, they typically look for:
   1. Companies that are ambitious & have plans to scale.
   2. Related to that, companies that will raise subsequent rounds of financing (so that they can exit earlier if they wish).
   3. The potential for another company to acquire your business (most lifestyle businesses are not designed to “exit”).

4. What skills do I need/what should I learn in order to be a good entrepreneur? Is a university degree required?

Short answer, no. Long answer, maybe.

Many people we know end up doing something completely different from what they studied. It’s not so much about what you’re studying, but more about why you’re studying.

Don’t just do a degree to pick up skills, then try to figure out what to do with those skills after. Education can be valuable if you know what you want to accomplish, identified your skill gaps, and intentionally pursue knowledge to sharpen those skills that you need to help you accomplish your goals.

As Isaac said, and again I paraphrase – “University was more about teaching me how to learn, how to work under pressure, how to work in a team, rather than specific hard skills. Although what I’m doing is related to my degree, many best practices have evolved with the times”.

5. How do I find a good mentor?

I oversimplify my own advice here. But a high level process:

1. Identify what you want to learn.
2. Identify who is best at it.
3. Start to get noticed by them – attend the events that they go to, show up online where they’re at, get to know the people in their network.
4. Approach them and build a relationship with them.
5. Make them your mentor
   • Understand how you want to learn from them, not everyone knows how to be a good mentor. You need to lead the relationship.
   • Mentorship may not need to be a formal “will you be my mentor”, in some cases, you can still get lots of value from a person and consider the person a mentor without formalizing the relationship (e.g. work for them, volunteer for them, ask them for advice, read their book, take their courses, etc.)

For a more detailed read, check out this blog post: How do I find a good mentor/advisor?

Book Recommendations?

General Entrepreneurship

• The Lean Startup by Eric Reis
• Running Lean by Ash Maurya
• 0 to 1 by Peter Thiel
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Sales

• Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
• The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman
• The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon

Marketing

• Contagious by Jonah Berger

More suggestions? Feel free to comment below.

If you’d like to watch the replay of the session, here’s the video: