The Entrepreneurship Marathon
I’ve run my own businesses most of my life, from being a paperboy at the age of 8 to currently running a custom fabrication ship with customers across most of the world.
Entrepreneurship is a Lifestyle
Entrepreneurship is very much a lifestyle, sometimes you can take things easy, other times, you are pounding the pavement for jobs, sometimes you have a lot of zeros in your bank account and other times you are in the red.
The one constant about entrepreneurship is chaos, it’s both the most exhilarating when things are going great and everybody wants your services and challenging when everything goes South… and this can change day-to-day!
The closest “job” I ever really had was when I worked at Evright.com in Australia for two years, it my first taste at a steady paycheck, working hours and the illusion & trappings of stability.
I really enjoyed my time there but I quit and bought a laser because it just wasn’t who I was, everyday felt similar to the other and it was similar to groundhog day for me for the last year there, not in a bad sense, but I was really itching to get back to the highs and lows of entrepreneurship.
Suffice it to say, almost all my friends run businesses of their own, they do so for various reasons, for some, it’s the money, others it’s following their passions and for others, there was simply no other choice offered to them.
Entrepreneurship isn’t always a CHOICE
When I graduated University with a Biology and Geography degree, THERE WERE NO JOBS IN MY FIELD, try as I may, month after month was passing and there was NOTHING.
Luckily before I graduated, a few years before actually, I began designing websites and ran a 3D animation studio, when I gave-up on the job search, I just did that full-time and it worked out for the best for a few years until everything crashed in the 2000s.
You can read more about how things ended-up how they are by reading this article.
Hands-on Entrepreneurship Lessons
With my web design and 3D animation studio, I had staff, contractors and a bunch of other business related trappings and to be honestly, I learned as I went, there are books, there are classes, but they tend to focus on business style and types that already exist.
You want to start a mechanic’s shop? Read this book. You want to start a real estate brokerage? Read this book… you want to start a web design and 3D animation studio with customers all around the world? NO BOOK FOR THAT!
When it came to designing, there WERE NO BOOKS for CNCs either that were any good, hence why I wrote a whole series of them to teach others (and myself) how to go about making CNC projects that, to be quite frank, are as relevant today as they were years ago.
I still make 3D models here and there but nowhere near the amount I once produced and sold plans for years ago.
http://cncroi.com/product-category/physical-model-kits/
Learn Wood, Metal & Plastics…
Guess how many books existed that would provide me any help with starting a custom fabrication shop? If you said NONE, you’d be totally right.
I landed back in North America with a CNC router and CNC laser and that was it.
How much experience did I have working with metal? Next to none (especially welding stuff together), how much with woodworking? About the same… and plastics, I’d be hard pressed to know what polycarbonate was over acrylic.
Like my earlier business, the one thing I kept out of that initial taste of entrepreneurship was to become comfortable with not knowing anything, and thriving in that environment.
Entrepreneurship is HARD!
There are a lot of challenges with entrepreneurship, by far the biggest is you are responsible for finding your own money!
I don’t make a dime unless I close a deal, deliver the product and get paid and although that sounds simple, there are so many ways things can go into the “no pay” territory that if you’ve never run your own business, it’s hard to explain just how challenging just getting projects and being paid is when you run your own shop.
I started CNCROi.com without any customers in a place I was away from for almost a decade, knowing next to nothing about materials or fabrication methods… luckily I had years to teach myself, as I did with 3D CNC modeling, to get this business to the point where I know loads more than I did back then.
That doesn’t mean things get easier, just having the knowledge and the skill doesn’t automatically translate to getting paying projects!
Sure, I know more about anodizing than I really should and the same goes with endless species of woods and the over a hundred options when it comes to custom Corian projects but all that knowledge came from experience, either working directly with or quoting projects customers wanted in materials I was then unfamiliar with.
Entrepreneurship takes time
I didn’t start CNCROi.com and instantly find a customers and develop business networks, these things take time, and a lot of effort.
Imagine going for a job interview several times a week and then that person becoming your boss… and multiply that over several years, that’s what entrepreneurship is really all about.
I don’t quite know why people thing entrepreneurship is “becoming your own boss” as really it’s “everybody becomes your boss” that would be dramatically more true a statement.
I meet-up with a customer that wants something cut in metal, there are lots of options, if they run a welding shop and we are going to make custom tags, their vocabulary and thoughts are very different from a grandmother looking for a custom cake topper for their son.
If anything, entrepreneurship is really a lifestyle of service, do it badly, and you don’t have customers, do it too well and you have more customers than you can count which can sometimes be just as bad because you start messing-up what got you to your current level of success to begin with.