What You Should Expect Before Starting Your Business

As an entrepreneur, soon after starting my first business, I realized that starting a business and then managing it properly is way more complicated than I originally thought it would be. In my case though, I did not even expect to make any money. I just started out to learn what it means to be in business for myself. I wanted to get a taste of entrepreneurship.

However, on the way, I started to believe more and therefore, started to commit more towards making it happen. I think it all worked out great in my case since I started with no expectations.

What I’ve noticed though is, almost everyone who has worked for someone has at some point thought about going into business for themselves. It’s a great idea and because you can work for yourself, express your own creativity, and if you’re lucky, you may even have absolute financial freedom.What most people do not realize, however, is starting your own business will not make things a lot easier. Starting your own business will require more thinking, more commitment and more organized efforts to make your business work.

Starting a business is great. But thinking you can succeed in it without any challenges, is a misconception because most of the time you would be working double the time in order to meet your business goals.

Having clarity in expectations is very important to your business goals. Here are things you should expect when starting your own business:

1. Your Business Will Need A Plan

Success is a planned event. People who fail to plan, surely plan to fail. Therefore, just because you are excited about doing something, it doesn’t mean you will succeed in it unless you exactly know your plan of action.

Your business goals drive your plan of action and only following up on that plan will bring success to you. If you are starting out, make sure you take time to plan before it’s too late.

2. Your Business Will Need You To Work Harder.

There is no such thing as easy money. Especially when you start your business and you are serious about making a healthy sum of money out of your venture, it will require you to work hard and work consistently for a period of time before your business income stabilizes.

In general, business owners work harder, take more risks, face more challenges than those who just have a job. But that is why they reap much higher rewards when they succeed. But until then it’s just hard work and perseverance that counts.

3. Your Business Will Have Ongoing Expenses.

There are expenses involved in starting a business, any kind of business. Starting a business requires investment in the infrastructure, products, employees, legal expenses etc. In addition to those, you may have to have ongoing expenses on tools, advertising and other business support materials.

You will need to prepare yourself to take care of these expenses on an ongoing basis. Your business will need this commitment from you.

4. Your Business Will Restrict Your Vacations

Starting a business is easy these days. But making the business profitable requires not just hard work, but also the commitment to take care of the business, nurture it and grow it to a level it can stand on its own and stabilize.

As a business owner, you can’t afford to go on vacations especially when it’s new and still growing to stabilize. Your business will need your devotion towards its growth. You may want to restrict going on longer and frequent vacations.

5. Your Friends And Relatives Will Test Your Commitment

It’s amazing how your friends and relatives are always ready to discourage you about your business idea no matter what business idea you come up with. If you are serious about your dream of owning and operating your business successfully, you will need to be ready to survive  the negativity from your own family members.

It’s not true that your friends and relatives do not care about you. In fact, they do. But negative is so automatic, naturally they want to tell you all the negative things about your venture so you are well informed (at least this is what they feel). Therefore, you need to expect that and be ready to move on with your plans. You can’t succeed going by other people’s opinions.

6. Your Business Will Face Competition

Sometimes we want to start a business where there is no competition or very little. However, even then, as soon as your business starts to make some money, you may quickly see competition in the same space. Having competition is perfectly normal and you should be prepared for it. We can’t avoid competition. You should rather plan to deal with it the right way.

7. Your Business Will Need You To Learn New Things

Employees, sometimes want to start a business of their own just because they are tired of learning new things for survival at their jobs. That is not a good reason for starting business. In fact, if you want to start a business so you can avoid learning new things, you are already on the wrong foot.

As a business owners, we need to learn things we never planned to learn, we need to do certain activities that we never thought we could do, and talk to people we never wanted to talk to. As a business owners, you will need to be willing to learn new things, meet new people and keep an open mind for new information.

Question: What can you recommend about market research before starting a business? How do you think that information can help an aspiring entrepreneur to plan for success in their new venture? Please share your thoughts in the comments.