Hello hivers!
Entrepreneurship is making waves in the 21century. But being an entrepreneur is not an easy task because you must have the ability to absorb shock, be a risk taker , be patient, and you must be able to withstand competition, Because you are not the only one who is in business.
EXPERIENCES
My experience as an entrepreneur started this year, which has not been easy. Because most times, I get discouraged and also I get emotionally down. Starting up a business is not easy as we all think, But the little I know as a young entrepreneur is that you should never lose faith in yourself and always focus on your goals. Because when you have the passion for something you tend to succeed with the right strategies.
Many of the failed businesses we see today are because they rush into a business not having a market strategy and not conducting a proper market survey. They are distracted by the fact that they see the same type of business which they want to venture into doing well and they forget the important part of starting a business, which is having a market strategy and having a good market survey.
Having a market strategy is what makes your business different from other businesses which started before yours and that will start after.
Having a proper market survey is knowing what your customers expects by gathering all the right information you can get and knowing the right strategy for you to accomplish your goals.
Most times as a new business owner, we are also human and we feel the urge to compare ourselves to others, forgetting that we all have our time space and we all have different talents. We tend to compare ourselves because when we look at other businesses and see that they are doing well, we compare ourselves to them and try to follow their footsteps. This will make you to lose focus on your goals.
For example, I’m a makeup artist and a human hair seller. Most times, when I go on social media, I see businesses like mine doing well, I tend to compare my business to theirs and with that, I start getting discouraged and disappointed, saying to myself that i am not going to be better than them. Forgetting that my business is just new and theirs has been there for long.
Disadvantages of comparison in business
When you start comparing your business to others, it tends to make you feel less of a business person, it discourages you, makes you disappointed in yourself, and makes you want to do anything that person does.
Following someone’s footsteps, is just you under the persons shadow. And you being under one’s shadow, you might find it difficult to excel. And if you continue with it, later in the long run you will find out that you have spent most of the early times of your company, which was supposed to be for formulating a good strategy, so as to be better than your competitors in the future. And when you finally discover that you’ve been under someone’s shadow not growing, it might be too late because you might have run your company to the wrong part and you will have no other options than to start over or shut down your business.
When I started my hair business, I did not generate a good strategy, I was busy comparing myself to other businesses and I was trying to be like them. at that early stage of business, I forgot that I was supposed to be looking for strategies that will make my business better than theirs instead of been like theirs. It made business slow for me, until I learnt that you are meant to have a competitive spirit and not a comparison spirit.
One thing we entrepreneur forget sometimes is that the person you are comparing yourself to is doing what works for them and it’s making them flourish in their business.
All you have to do when feeling discouraged is not to follow someone’s footstep’s but for you to continue doing what works for you and doing it better, also changing your market strategy.
Competition in a business is not bad, but comparison is. Competition makes a business innovative and it forces you to do things different and better. So instead of comparing your business with another business why don’t you compete with them by trying to make your business better and grow to be more than the other business. We can channel our competitive spirit from following your competitors footsteps, to making your products and services better than theirs and find your own strategy.
As an entrepreneur, I have found out that we all have our unique strategy which we all need to discover, not following the footsteps of someone else cause you don’t know where that is leading.
You have to create that footsteps which you want to follow because only you know how your shoe fit and where you want to wear it to.
Being an entrepreneur I have been able to manage my time very well and I venture into different things that I know will bring more money.
NO KNOWLEDGE IS A WASTE
When I was in the university, we were forced to take an entrepreneurship class and we also drafted our business plans and defended it. My business plan was on fish feed which I did not take serious I just did and online research, then I bought the fish feed from the market.
I never knew life after school was going to be this tough. I and my friends thought after school won’t be hard on us, that we could get jobs easily if we get good grades. That made us take the entrepreneurship class less serious, the business plans we made were just because we wanted to pass the course, not because we had passion for it.
Now, we have seen ourselves in the business world and most of us have regretted not taking that class serious, because if we had we won’t be finding it hard in the business world.
No knowledge is a waste because owning my own business, I reminisce to the little things I listened to in entrepreneurship class and I use them as a guideline.
My entrepreneurship teacher always says that as a social entrepreneur you must have the ability to absorb shock and you must also be a risk taker. You should also have foresight of what the future holds not just limiting your goals and vision to now but it should be a vision that will last ( a long term).
AS AN ENTREPRENEUR
As an entrepreneur it’s good to train yourself to face disappointment, because most of us are not strong-willed. When you are not strong-willed little disappointments in your business will throw you off balance. As an entrepreneur, you don’t need to dwell on disappointments, because if you do, it will only make you frustrated and with frustration to tend to lose focus on your goal and give up.
As an entrepreneur you must be open to new ideas, the ability to learn everyday, and also learn new strategies. Because as time goes by, things change because of the fact that change is constant. Most times you do everything right but when you don’t want to learn or adopt the new ideas. You see that everything is not working right for you.
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it!!
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