Growing up I always knew what I wanted to be.
My mum insisted that I studied so that I could one day get a job with good pay, but I was never great at school. To be fair, that’s not entirely true, I was an excellent pupil, but I’d only produce good work at the start of the school year.
I remember stumbling into school at the beginning of every school year, pumped up by my mother's' motivational talks, sporting a new pencil case and brand new Kickers. I’d even take a seat at the front of the class, my hand would shoot up every time the teacher asked an easy question and I would treat my new textbook like it was sacred, only using a fountain pen to write within it.
Sadly, this enthusiasm would dissolve into laziness within 2 months. I put this down to a number of reasons, I’ve always had the attention span of a goldfish and sadly this meant I could never keep up the straight-laced image, I also felt that the lessons were either too challenging or not challenging enough.
In truth, I never really believed in the education system, but that's not because I disliked school. I loved the tuck shop pizzas before Jamie Oliver helped banish them.
For me, going on to university and coming out the other end working a 9-6 job as an accountant, solicitor or banker just wasn’t inspiring enough, no offence to anyone, but I felt like those jobs were prison-like, a dead end with no flexibility, and so for me the orthodox education system just didn’t work.
I wanted to be an entrepreneur!
When I was in my teens I didn't really understand what the word entrepreneur meant, but I always associated it with freedom and flexibility, I believed that being an entrepreneur would let me enact that overused phrase my teachers would always drum into my head “the world is your oyster.”
What did I Learn?
I’ve helped start a number of businesses over the years, offered consultancy and created something out of nothing. In this time I can genuinely say that I’ve learnt a thing or two about the word entrepreneur and what it means.
I learnt that being an entrepreneur is like a blank excel spreadsheet, the program and its features are almost endless, from statistics and charts, calculations to coding the spreadsheet is a little bit like an entrepreneur, blank, frictionless and with no direction, you need to have goals, otherwise just like the spreadsheet your entrepreneurial journey will remain blank.
Being an entrepreneur means there can be no ifs or buts, you must do! You cannot remain motionless, you need to continue to create, if you do not, you will become stagnant and your competition will gobble you up!
I also learnt not to have all of my eggs in one basket, on the other hand, I found out that I also needed to focus on producing great work and this meant I could not spread myself too thinly!
I realised that nothing was easy and that patience was the most important aspect of my entrepreneurial journey.
Having a start-up business is no easy ride, I learnt that I needed to be tight-fisted with my money, assessing and analysing every penny I spent so that I could make the little money I had work 10X harder for me. I hated being a penny-pinching git, but if I didn't my startup would disintegrate quicker than I could write the word invoice.
Now that I mention it, invoicing was staggeringly difficult, I sat up at night wondering why my product wouldn't sell whilst I came to terms with the fact that If I don't pay my bills soon, there will be no product to sell, it would, in essence, be Game Over!
I also learnt that most people don't really care about your problems and they are always far too busy, their attention span seems to be worse than mine and so in order to appease those goldfish I’m going to cut this article short.
Before I depart, I want to tell my fellow entrepreneurs that “If you do nothing, nothing will happen!"
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Written by Koray Ismail © 2017