You’ve made it to the final level. Part III will show you the path to take to increase your odds of entrepreneurial success. I’ve shared that other careers have paths. So why can’t entrepreneurs have a path?
Armed with the right knowledge, you can avoid half the mistakes you might make on your entrepreneurial journey. The other half are inevitable, necessary, and unavoidable. You’ll hit a few potholes and change a few tires. Mistakes are part of the learning process. Frankly, you may still fail even if you avoid the mistakes you would have otherwise made. Rather than a failsafe plan, I’m showing you a road that is a little less bumpy than the usual one. You’re still going to be jostled by plenty of bumps. You must learn from your mistakes, as they are lessons.
As we embark on the path, I want to prepare you for what’s in store. First, we’re going to address education—both higher education and the school of hard knocks. From there, we’ll look at the benefits of pursuing your passion: how to find your passion and how doing so will increase your odds of success.
We’ll then discuss the value of mentorship. A mentor can impart years of experience in a fraction of that time, help you avoid train wrecks, and help get you to where you want to go faster. I’ll share the exact steps for finding the mentor who’s right for you.
Having achieved clarity on the importance of education, passion, and mentorship, we’ll take action and begin your journey, helping you make your entrepreneurial leap and start your business. I’ll share the nine stages of building your business, and then offer some helpful resources for a lifetime of growth, learning, and motivation. At the end of each chapter, you’ll have an opportunity to capture your thoughts and ideas on a worksheet.
The best way to think about following the entrepreneur’s path is passing a series of guideposts. Since everyone is different, the details of every entrepreneur’s road to success are unique. But at a high level, every entrepreneur’s path has the same stages, which I want to show you to expedite your journey.
To return to an earlier point, being an entrepreneur and starting a successful business are hard. In the process of writing this book, Mike Nehra of Vintage King Audio pleaded with me to make that clear. “It’s not just really hard and stressful at times. It also can cause disruption to family, friends, and marriages. It can be an obsessive beast, difficult to tame, and it can hurt your physical well-being. It can keep you awake at night, knowing you’re personally tied to the financial ups and downs and responsible for the livelihood of ten, fifty, a hundred-plus people.” He goes on to say, “However, many rewards from owning a business include the ability to be creative, the freedom of lifestyle, the positive impact we have on thousands of customers in our space, and it beats working for someone else.”
You can think of the path the way you do about your health. If you want to get in peak shape, feel great, and have unlimited energy, a trainer can show you how to work out, when to work out, what to eat, how much to eat, and when to eat. But you then have to make all of the individual decisions and do the work. Only you can decide how to respond to physical and mental setbacks and challenges. Only you can get yourself to work out consistently, push your limits, choose the right foods, and say no to the wrong ones.
Similarly, I can only show the way. You have to make all of the decisions, do the hard work, and be consistently disciplined. With the stage set for part III, let’s take the first step on your path.