When starting as an entrepreneur you have a vision of where you want to grow your business towards. To reach that goal, on average it takes 5-7 years during which you realise there are no shortcuts.

Roughly speaking, each entrepreneur has to go through and experience the following five steps:

1. No matter how great your product or service, when starting out you realise only few customers want to actually buy —> you need to get your value proposition and communication right!
2. Then when sales are picking, you realise very little of the expected revenue ends up in your pocket —> time to get your business model straightened out!
3. To make a profit, you realise you have to increase your pricing —> when you finally find the courage to do just that, you experience relief that many of your customers are just fine to pay a bit more! You discover your product or service has real value!
4. Now you’re growing your business, you realise you have become a single point of failure → you have to find employees who can take over for the different roles you have been combining since you founded your company…
5. Finally, to grow to scale you realise just incremental revenue growth is not going to cut it anymore —> and that one way to live up to your potential is to go out and get investors on board allowing them to take on a share of your company…

SPARK OF THE DAY

Whether you make it as an entrepreneur or not all depends on your willingness to learn and your endurance with gaining experiences.

As Maya Angelou said wisely:
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”