Forward Thinking for Future Entrepreneurs

How to Use This Book

My goal in writing this book is to encourage entrepreneurship. People who want to become entrepreneurs need to know that there are people out there cheering them on. I also believe that small businesses make communities better, regions better, countries better, and the world better. Entrepreneurs are independent thinkers who know how to take educated risks and will battle harder than anyone to get things accomplished. We need as many people like that as we can find.

The stories and advice in these chapters are meant to encourage and prepare you for becoming a business owner. They are stories of real-life experiences, and they can help you make fewer mistakes so you can be successful faster.

How This Book is Organized

There are four sections to this book:

About Being in Business

These chapters take you inside the ropes of what it’s like to own a business from people who are business owners. It gets you prepared for the experience of entrepreneurship.

Becoming a Business Owner

This section helps you think about the skills and experiences you have accumulated, and how you can apply them to being an owner. It also discusses several ways you can own a business.

The 4M Business Plan Framework

These chapters cover key elements of a business plan: the money, the marketing, the muscle, and the management. It has been simplified so you know why the sections matter and what to include in them.

10 Tips To Save You Time and Money

These final chapters are a collection of tips that may come in handy as you prepare your business idea and get started.

Experience Tips and Final Thoughts

The experience tips and final thoughts in each chapter are a little extra knowledge from the frontlines of business ownership. These shared experiences show the real-world workings of this information and why it matters.

How This Book is Different

The content of these pages comes from people who once stood where you stand right now: starting down the path to business ownership. It is a lived experience book, meaning that the stories and situations shared really happened to people starting and running a business. When you can learn from someone who has “walked the walk” as a business owner, it’s a deeper kind of insight. You’ll know what I mean after you’ve been in business for a while, but for now, I’m asking you to go with me on this.

Why Do You Want to Start a Business?

Your motivation for starting a business plays a significant role in achieving success. Motivation will get you through the startup phase; it’s the driving force that will help you emerge from difficult times, and it’s the most influential factor that will help you reach your goals.

Starting a business is not a quick fix to a current problem; rather, it’s a way to build a long-term outcome that you want for yourself. There is no magic checklist that can tell you if your motivation is sufficient to spend the time and money it takes to launch your own business. Still, there are some ways you can evaluate your reasons to see if the depth is there for the long term.

Here are some common motivations:

Control Over Your Future

Having control is a bit of an illusion. In working for someone else, others may decide when you are promoted, at what level you are paid, and what your responsibilities are in your role. As a business owner, your clients have some control over your working life as well, such as wanting you to be available after hours or asking to negotiate your fees.

The motivation for control over your life is about wanting to decide your future. If you cannot get that working for someone else, then maybe entrepreneurship is a good path forward. If you can negotiate that with your employer, or with another opportunity, that may be all you need to feel in control of your future.

Paid Your Worth

If you are the person in your workplace who genuinely works harder than other people, but you’re compensated at the same rate (or less), you may feel that you’re just not being paid what you're worth. Be aware that you will have to dedicate some money to starting your business, and it may be a while before you have customers on a regular basis. It’s not as easy as opening a store and then being flooded with millions of dollars.

The motivation for appropriate pay is being able to match the money earned through your work ethic. If you are a hard worker, you want that to reflect in your bank account. This is also a conversation you may be able to have with your employer, or with a new employer, and that might solve the feeling of being paid what you’re worth. Alternatively, if you don’t see a way to a higher level of compensation working for someone else, then starting a business may be the answer.

Enjoying Work and Enjoying Life

Despite all the talk about work-life balance, it’s a tricky motivator for becoming a business owner.

Working for someone else involves adhering to their rules, dealing with commuting times, having someone be the boss of you, etc. However, it also means you don’t have to worry about being paid and that someone else is helping you build your retirement (pension) plan.

Working for yourself means that when your employee calls in sick, you’re the person who has to fill their shoes, and then do your business owner work that night. It means you’re the person with all the responsibility, even when situations were caused by someone else.

The motivation here is to be able to enjoy your work and enjoy your life; that’s the balance. Make sure that the career you’re prepared to trade for being a business owner is going to give you what you want.

The People Factor

Challenging coworkers and bad bosses are two of the biggest frustrations in the corporate workplace. However, challenging people are everywhere, and they exist even when you are the owner of a business.

As an employee, you can quit and find another job. As a business owner, you can fire a client or refuse to onboard someone as a customer. There are solutions for both situations; just understand that great people and not-so-great people exist in both scenarios.

The motivation that drives people to own a business is having more choice over the people they work with and how they work with them.

Enjoying What You Do

Some people have spent a career working at something that matched their qualifications, and while they may have enjoyed it at one point, they have now fallen out of love with their job. Other people have always felt unqualified to do a certain type of work, but after gaining experience and qualifications working for someone else, they’re ready to finally pursue a business that makes them happy.

The motivation to do what you enjoy leads to a more positive life. Enjoying your work often means that you are less stressed about it, and that includes making sure you generate enough income. Money concerns are a main cause of stress in life, so before launching full speed ahead into a business, make sure the thing you enjoy is a financially viable endeavor. If not, you’ll spend your golden years working at a job you dislike even more because you need the money.

An Opportunity Presents

Sometimes an opportunity comes your way to own a business. It might be the chance to own a family business or to purchase a business that has come up for sale. It might also be that you have an idea for a product or service that could really take off in your community or industry. Always test the opportunity with a business plan to make sure the viability is truly there. Even with an established business, the current owner will have a different financial circumstance than you have, so make sure you know what’s ahead if you assume the boss’s chair.

Just because an opportunity exists doesn’t mean you have to take it. You may be under pressure to take over a family enterprise for legacy purposes, but you have to want to do it. If it’s not what you want or not what you could grow to appreciate, it might not be fulfilling for you.

Be sure the motivating factor comes from within you, not from what others think you should do.

Experience Tip

If you’re unsure about your motivation to start a business, here’s a question for you: What could someone offer you as an employee that would make you not start a business? If you could design your career—salary, benefits, time off, responsibilities, etc.—what would it look like?

If that ideal situation is something you could achieve by working for someone else, then maybe you just need to switch workplaces as opposed to lifestyles. This is not to dissuade you from pursuing entrepreneurship; rather, just to make sure that becoming an entrepreneur will give you what you want.

Final Thoughts

Whatever your reason for wanting to own a business, make sure it’s a strong one. The chapters in this book will help you test your business idea, but the motivation to stick with it will often come down to why you wanted to do this in the first place.

Also, there is one more thing to consider.

There may come a time when you decide that owning a business is not the right thing for you after all. There’s nothing wrong with that. You are not tied to this business for the rest of your life. A benefit of owning a business can be having something to sell when you’re ready to move on, whether that’s five years later or 50 years down the road.

What do you want the business to do for you?

Being a Business Owner Can Change Your Life

Owning a business is a life-changing experience. It’s not better or worse than working for someone else; it’s just different. Our society needs people who start businesses and people who work for them—the best choice for you depends on the life you want to live.

Here are some of the benefits of becoming a business owner:

• You cannot lose your job
• You cannot get overlooked for promotions or lose out to someone less qualified
• You don’t have to work for a bad manager or an uninspiring leader
• You are rewarded for the quality of the job you do, not because of years of service
• There is no ceiling on your income
• You decide your work hour schedule
• You can take time off whenever you want
• You can choose how you want to work – remotely, in office, from home, etc.
• You can create new ways to earn revenue and add value
• You choose your routine
• You have something to sell when you’re ready to retire
• You are investing in yourself
• You can use your skills to their fullest potential and learn whatever new skills you want to learn
• You can create a legacy for your family
• You don’t have to answer to anyone
• You don’t have to work in a toxic environment
• You can do something you enjoy doing
• You have more control over your well-being
• You can hire great people and treat them great

There are fewer business owners than employees in the world, so entrepreneurship is not a lifestyle that suits the majority. I have had conversations with people of different ages who thought about starting their own businesses but decided against it, and the key factor that tipped the scales for them was the perceived risk. I understand that.

Some of the benefits of being an employee include:

• You are only responsible for your specific job, not what everyone else does
• Your years of service can be an asset if your company is unionized or provides rewards based on the length of time you’ve worked for them
• You can always switch jobs to earn a higher income
• You don’t have to figure out a work schedule—someone else has that headache
• Your workspace is the same every day
• You don’t have to figure out a routine—it’s provided to you based on how it works best for the organization
• You might have a pension plan through your company
• You may have a clear separation between work life and personal life

The risk has to be worth the reward, and risks change at various stages of your life. When you’re single with no commitments, your risk is different than when you’re married with children, a mortgage, and car payments.

No checklist guarantees that pursuing entrepreneurship is the right choice. No test or scoring system determines your chances of success. It’s a personal decision that you make based on the information you have available to you. The more helpful information you have, the better. That’s why you make a business plan.

Experience Tip

When I was creating my business plan for Forward Thinking, I was excited to be doing it. I felt like I finally had the opportunity to put my skills to work for myself. There were certainly parts of the plan that were challenging to figure out, but I wanted to figure them out because I was motivated to find a solution that would work.

Many of the ways a business changes your life emerge after you have been in business for a while, and if you choose to become an entrepreneur, you can write your own list of how owning a business has changed your life. Some of this decision is trust in the life you want to build and the willingness to take the risk to make it happen.

Final Thoughts

Running a business has been the best decision I have made in my career. I had times where I could have sold my business or closed it and taken a job working for someone else, but I decided that the rewards of being my own boss were higher than these other opportunities. Even when other opportunities offered me more money than I was currently earning, it wasn’t enough to pull me away from being an entrepreneur.

I also know people who owned a business for a while and then returned to being an employee for someone else. When you own a business, you have a different kind of flexibility in your career, and you can leverage that to keep creating the life you want.

Whether you own a business for a long while or a short while, it can, and it will, change your life.

What Can a Business Do for You?

If you’re looking at entrepreneurship as an alternative to your current work situation, it can be helpful to think about what you want owning a business to do for you. Is the priority on replacing an income or having more flexibility with your schedule? Are you wanting to work in the business the whole time or just until you can hire enough people to run the operation without you?

While your focus on starting a business is on getting it up and running, you can make better decisions at the startup phase if you know how you want the business to evolve in the future. Here are some long-term scenarios and how they can play out in your startup business plan.

Replacing an Income

If you’re starting a business to replace your income, you need to know the revenue you must generate to do that successfully. Tally up your take-home pay and any benefits (i.e., pension contributions, uniform allowance, Christmas bonus, etc.) that are paid with your current salary. Now you know what you need to earn to replace your income.

Replacing an income by running a business can happen in one of two ways.

First, you can account for an owner’s salary, retirement contribution, uniform, and bonus in the expense section of your cash flow statement. Then you make a plan to create enough income to ensure you pay all your expenses.

Second, you can consider the write-offs you will have that can contribute to your overall income. For example, common expenses you may be able to deduct as items required to run your business include cellphone, vehicle payment plus fuel and maintenance, a percentage of your home expenses to accommodate your home office, a percentage of meals, travel to attend conferences, steel-toed boots and work uniforms, and more.

When you consider the costs of these items, you might be able to save thousands of dollars by running a business, which means you don’t have to replace the same amount of income as you are making from your current job.

To have a successful business, you need to make money. Know what you need the business to provide so you can plan successfully.

Creating a Legacy Business

You may have an idea to create a business that could employ you and your children and perhaps be passed down to your grandchildren. This can be difficult to plan for in the beginning because you don’t know if your children will want to pursue this type of career, let alone whether their children, if they have any, will also choose to do that. However, even if this is not a business that is passed down through generations, it can be a business that you build and sell to someone else. You can create elements of your startup phase to help achieve that.