Being an entrepreneur is a journey never traveled in a straight line. It’s not a linear path with a nice little manual that tells you what to do and what not to do, there’s no direction and definitely no one size fits all model.

It’s a journey that often takes you on a roller coaster of a ride, leading you in all sorts of different directions. The hardest part about this roller coaster is understanding that you have to be flexible and capable of adapting to changing situations and environments before they even happen. The ability to spot trends before they happen can literally make or break your ability to survive and thrive.

Always be thinking 5-10 years from now and always be understanding how the environment is shifting and where you need to position yourself to make it work! Those who are flexible will make it and thrive, while those who refuse to adapt will fail to grow and develop as the business environment changes over time.

I see a lot of people who say, “Oh, you run your own business? That's great, you get to do whatever you want, you make your own hours and all you do is party and drink mimosas.”  

That is entirely untrue unless you managed to raise a bunch of money for your business and then didn’t care to put in the follow through work necessary to allow your business to thrive! These are the people that have little to no idea how to manage their business in the short and long term, blow through all their finances and end up with nothing to show for it in the end.

So when you quit the work world, you’re not sitting at a desk all day, you’re running your own business and your own projects and your own everything, you are grinding 24/7. You have to be up and running with things, working long hours to make it work and if you’re not getting enough done it’s time to make more hours in the day. Get up earlier, take less breaks, stop messing around for three hours at lunch .

You have to decide whether or not you want things automated and whether or not automation takes away from the human aspect that people crave from a brand. It’s about you getting out there talking to your current (and potential) audience and then going back to put in the work. If you are not even willing to do that, you are eventually going to fail.  Most business owners don’t succeed because they just continuously fail and then they finally give up.

The key to all of this is understanding that everything falls on the you - the entrepreneur - to understand the flow, manage finances effectively and to put in the work to ensure that what you’re doing will not fail. If you don’t understand something or you’re not good at something find someone who is and do whatever it takes to convince them to work with you. This way you can focus on your strength and they can build and support your weaknesses.

We can be good at some things, but we absolutely cannot be good at everything!