Most entrepreneurs and small business owners started out their careers
working for someone else.
You might have had a career
for 5 years or 50 years before you decided to start your own business.
Or you may even be working for someone else even as you struggle to
develop your own business in your spare time.
Working for someone else is
fundamentally different from working for yourself.
There is an employee mindset
and an entrepreneur mindset
and they are markedly different.
If you have been working for many years
for someone else,
you may not realize t
hat there is a difference in mindset.
The longer you've worked as an employee,
the harder it is to change this mindset
and start thinking like an entrepreneur.
However, the employee mindset may not
serve you well as a business owner.
In fact, it can work against you to guarantee
that your business never reaches fruition.
As an employee, it is easy
to blame others in an organization
for responding too slowly, for missing opportunity
As an entrepreneur, you are solely responsible for all things, good or bad.
Entrepreneurs create something from nothing, with freedom to chart their path.
You are the sole creator of that destiny.
you were likely responsible for delivering tasks
or accomplishing short-term goals,
but you were likely not responsible for the
long term goals of the company
As an entrepreneur, you have to focus on both short term and long term goals and your vision for the company
As an employee, you likely did not make decisions that had the biggest impact
to your company's bottom line.
Also, you likely had a team of other people
you worked with to make decisions.
For the Entrepreneur,
Discomfort is the new reality.
You don't have all the answers,
and you likely need to make quick decisions
with very little input from others.
you had a narrow scope in terms of your job.
Any training you completed likely
was directly related to your role
As an entrepreneur
you have to wear many hats - project manager, sales, finance, marketing, IT, etc.
you toed the line - following orders from above.
As an entrepreneur,
you aren't interested in the status quo.
You always look for ways to improve.
These are some of the key differences between the employer and entrepreneur mindsets
Next week we look at the small business owner mindset versus the entrepreneur mindset.