Many youngsters think that if they have more money they can have a successful business. What they need to understand is that business is about standing on your own foot and surviving without an organization behind you. In fact, you work hard so that others can find it easy to make a livelihood. Things will never be easy for the business owner. They need to work hard, be systematic, have all round knowledge, be courageous and have the guts, brains and skills to solve the business problems as and when they arrive.
However, most aspiring business people think that a business allows them to keep all the money for themselves. It comes from either working on a job or seeing someone work in a job and noticing that out of the full billing they are receiving only a fraction of that as their salary. They believe if they work on their own they can keep all the money to themselves. This is a thinking driven by greed and desire.
When actually they get into business, that desire to make money is easily obvious to their customer who gets scared and will award the project or work to someone else. So in reality the business man has to control his desire and focus on serving the customer. They need to do a good job of helping their customer and create a positive track record of taking care of their previous customer. Maximizing their profit creates unhappy customers and that kills your business. This requires the businessman or independent professional to rise beyond their needs and to value the needs of their customer over them or at least as much as their needs. This is an essential criteria before success will even think of changing your life by bringing fortune your way.
Doing a job vs Becoming a business owner
Doing a job is a small role and limited role. You can pick a narrow area that is close to your strength and can do that relatively comfortably. Anything else is not your job. Nobody can blame you, much less fire you for not doing someone else’s job. A software engineer will not do the job of the salesman and the salesman will not do the job of the accountant. So thinking in terms of a limited role is OK with a job. However, if you are a business owner or partner or an independent professional you need to do many things. You need to work hard and smart to simplify things because you have to do so many things in your limited working hours.
A businessman needs to have courage to succeed in a business. There are so many things that can go wrong, they should have the capacity to face the challenges, survive and somehow overcome that challenge in order to keep their business running. This attitude to face challenges requires a self-sufficient attitude and ability. The workers need the business, the businessman can create another business or will change the existing business model to ensure it can survive the changes in the market place.
A businessman will never have all the things to make success comfortable. There will be 5 people or sometimes more who want to get a certain contract or project. Only one will get. 4-8 shops may open offering some products and only 1 -3 may survive next year. The businessman should take that situation as a challenge and somehow win the game. They should be masters of the art of winning. If they do unethical things, life will catch-up and they will get into trouble later. Obviously, their business will fail after such situation.
There will be daily challenges and constant stress. The days will be long and work will be tough. However, some people prefer such situations. They like to be on their own and test themselves. They create methods and techniques to consistently survive in such situations.
Getting a job is lot easier than establishing a profitable business
It is funny that sometimes those who don’t get a job start thinking about creating their own business. It may be true that sometimes a very talented person may be unfit for a low level job. They are way too capable. But in 99% of situations, it is that the person is not even fit to handle a job.
Remember the skills and talent required to get a job are a lot less than the skills and talent required to start and make a business successful. Before you have a fanciful ideas of starting your own business be honest to yourself and check – Did you want to own your business purely because you are not able to get a job? Doing a job is 10 times easier than starting and succeeding in your own business. Beware of making a mistake that lakhs of people before you have done and destroyed their life.
Originally published at Marvist.co.in – Republished with permission