I’ve been doing some of advising and mentoring to both aspiring and existing entrepreneurs wanting insights to help grow their businesses. This is something I genuinely enjoy doing. As much as these individuals learn from my experiences and mistakes, I also learn from them and get motivated by their eagerness to succeed.
As a business owner, I strongly believe that’s it’s very important to give back to your community and share insights and experiences with other entrepreneurs. Small businesses are the engines to any economy that employee nearly the entire workforce. It would be a shame for successful entrepreneurs to withhold their knowledge when others could grow and benefit from it.
On a macro level, sharing your insights and guiding aspiring entrepreneurs in the right direction will help build and stimulate the business ecosystem, which will only benefit everyone in the end. Looking back, I wish I had some mentorship when I was starting out, it would have helped a great deal.
In my time speaking and advising dozens of entrepreneurs, I’ve broken them down into three main types:
1. “Excuse-Makers”
This category of “entrepreneurs” simply don’t have what it takes to take the leap. They’re constantly making excuses and trying to justify to themselves, why they shouldn’t take the next step, or why a business idea won’t work. We all know people like this. To be frank, individuals in this category are not cut out to be entrepreneurs, which is totally fine. Business ownership is not for everyone.
2. “Wanters“
These are the people with a bunch of ideas, always talk about wanting to start a business, talking about getting involved in different projects, etc. At the end of the day, as much as these people “want” to get into business (which is great), they have an impossible time pushing through to that next step and actually taking some action. This group usually have decent ideas and good smarts, but just don’t know how to make the next move. This category people are usually more effective as a number 3, 4 or 5 in a company rather than a number 1.
3. “Go-Getters”
These are the very small few, who’ve actually gone out and created and/or attempted to create something for themselves. Unlike the “Excuse-Makers” and “Wanters”, this category of entrepreneurs break through the initial steps in starting a business and actually go out and get in front of their market and customer base to start selling. That is by far the hardest step in starting a business, and it’s a very slim amount of people who get there.
I suppose if business were easy, we’d have a lot more entrepreneurs and business owners than employees. To put it in perspective, small businesses with less than 20 workers, employ 90% of the entire population.
Just goes to show you how few and far between the “Go-Getters” actually are.