The first great American dream is owning your own house. The second is creating your own business.
Deciding to be an entrepreneur is an emotional leap of faith. You need to ask yourself, “What does my gut say?” Does it tell you, “Go for it! This is the time, this is the window, this is the idea, these are the people?”
Or is your gut telling you something else? There’s no right or wrong answer, but know what you’re getting into. If you answer yes to the following nine questions, you might be an entrepreneur.
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1. Do you have a mild obsession that slightly concerns those around you?
Think of Elise Strachan, who created My Cupcake Addiction (#SweetSquad)—a successful blog—by baking amazing, complicated cupcakes and taking photos of them. Do you have that kind of passion? Does your idea keep you up at night? Do you eat, sleep, and breathe it when you’re not doing your day job? Are you reading books or watching YouTube videos on your topic?
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2. Are you tenacious?
Are you the kind of person who makes a commitment and sees it through to the end? Are you resourceful? Are you the type of person who can make a way out of no way? When Sara Blakely had the idea for Spanx, she wrote her own patent application to reduce the legal fees, knocked on the doors of hosiery mills in North Carolina when they wouldn’t take her phone calls seriously, and designed her own packaging.
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3. Do you have strong interpersonal relationships?
You don’t have to be the most popular person, nor do you necessarily have to have a wide network or a community—although it helps. You do have to be able to communicate effectively with and persuade other people.
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4. Do you influence how people see things?
If you don’t have at least over 1,000 people in your LinkedIn (or other type of network), you’ll probably have a hard time building and sustaining your business. Social networks like LinkedIn and AngelList are where the modern-day Rolodex meets résumé. You know someone who knows someone, and these networks bring you closer to finding that someone who can help you with your business.
Businesses are built and sustained on the power of relationships. Do you have strong relationships at church or temple or your kids’ school or a professional organization? You may know more people than you realize, and now is the time to optimize and leverage those relationships in new and more powerful ways for them as well as for you. There’s power in helping someone, and someone in your network can help you.
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5. Are you willing to go into debt?
Are you so passionate about this idea that you would be willing to take on debt because you believe in it so much? A lot of people would say no, and that’s okay.
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6. Are you willing and able to take on the risk of being paid last?
When my business partner, Roz, and I founded Fission Strategy, our consulting business and later our startup, Attentive.ly, we had to pony up some of our own cash to make payroll more than once. We paid ourselves back, but being a good business owner often means that you have to pay your people before you get paid.
When an idea connects to all the innate qualities of your passion—the tenacity, the sleepless nights, the commitment—often a business is born. I had three or four different concepts for businesses before I launched the first one successfully. Most entrepreneurs have multiple ideas, which isn’t a problem. The goal is to move that idea from ideation to manifestation.
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7. Are you comfortable making big decisions?
Do you prefer to focus on the practice of what you like doing in your work? Then entrepreneurship is probably not for you. That’s a legitimate choice, and it is the choice of most people. They want to understand the minimum and maximum required to do their job and enjoy their lives without worrying about payroll. If you’re an entrepreneur with employees, those employees depend on you for their livelihood. Knowing your decisions could impact whether a bunch of people are able to buy groceries for their kids or pay the rent is an awful lot of responsibility.
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8. Are you comfortable with hiring and firing people?
Few people like firing an employee and most people feel good about hiring, but some people even find hiring stressful. They can spin their wheels trying to find the perfect person, and there is no perfect person. Usually someone aiming to join your team is not a 100 percent fit, but if you’re at 70 percent to 80 percent, that’s enough. They can be trained to do the rest.
Firing people is something that most people really dread and fear. Are you strong enough inside to quickly identify whether or not someone is performing, and fire them? Or they’re doing great, but you’re having a challenge in the business, or you have to take the business in a different direction. Are you willing and able to fire a whole department and take on that weight, knowing how you affected their lives? Those are the risks.
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9. Are you a disciplined self-starter?
Would you start working in the morning even if no one was watching you or paying you to do so? Can you assign yourself tasks and follow through on self-imposed deadlines or are you more likely to watch YouTube and then take a nap? Entrepreneurs fly solo for the early part of the journey, and unless you are more like Amelia Earhart than Lena Dunham’s character from Girls, you may need to be honest about your current capacity for drive and self-propulsion.
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Do you have what it takes?
Hating having a boss is not the same as running a business. Working at home in your pajamas isn’t about ease and comfort. It’s about the fact that you don’t have time to put on clothes because you have been working nonstop. That’s your first year of business.
You also decide what you pay yourself. You set your hourly rate, if that’s what your business looks like, or you set your salary. Of course, it’s not 100 percent up to you. You have to have revenue, which depends on what the market is willing to bear and the environment you’re in.
Ultimately, you’re in the driver’s seat, which can be scary for a lot of people. But if you answered yes to the above questions, you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur.
This article was adapted from the book, “Mechanical Bull: How You Can Achieve Startup Success,” by Cheryl Contee. She is the award-winning CEO of the digital agency Do Big Things, a diverse team that is using a new narrative and new tech to create global change in a new era.
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