Being an entrepreneur is not like working in a large corporation. The very same things that make it an attractive proposition make it a difficult journey. I started many businesses in the years after I left the corporate world. I was convinced that my experience and knowledge would ensure my success as an entrepreneur. But as I embarked on this journey and set up the first few businesses, I began to realize a number of things; first and foremost, running a small business or startup is very different from running a large company where you are an employee and have more resources at your disposal. The skills you need to successfully operate your own businesses are very different. I realized that I needed to learn a lot more to ultimately be successful as an entrepreneur.

‘You must work on things that you think you want, and fail at them, until you realize what you really want’

In the early days of this journey, I had put everything I owned into bootstrapping the business. I experimented to learn what worked and what didn’t. I realized that you must work on things you think you want, and fail at them, until you realize what you really want. Most people who get regular jobs, working for someone else, never get this chance. But this comes at a price, my savings were severely depleted. At the same time, I got married and all of a sudden with the plan to start a family I began to start doubting my ability to sustain myself on this journey. I looked at my bank account every day and saw more money going out as I had to sustain the businesses. I had people working for me who depended on a salary and I was getting really stressed. Trouble was brewing at home as well and as I got deeper into this the problems seemed like they were multiplying exponentially. I looked around me and many of my contemporaries were in high paying jobs, had investments and a lifestyle that I could only dream of at the time. I considered giving up on more than one occasion and even started looking for jobs. I got several offers and was tempted to just give up and go back to the simplicity of earning a paycheck but somehow deep inside me, I kept thinking that if I give up now, I would regret it. So, I persevered, despite the toll it was taking on me, my relationships and my family. My situation was all in my mind and I needed to do this to fulfill my purpose in life. I bet the farm on this project and there was no turning back — fighting against everything that I was taught in school and with many people thinking I was reckless. I relate the feeling I had to a wonderful movie called Touching the Void. If you haven’t seen this, it’s an amazing story of survival, guts and determination when facing seemingly insurmountable odds. It’s the story of 2 young men who climb a mountain in the Andes and on the way down one of them breaks his leg. His partner tries to lower him down the mountain by rope, but he falls off a precipice and the partner has to cut the rope to save himself. The guy who broke his leg falls into a crevasse high in the mountains and is presumed dead. He somehow survives and amazingly, with one broken leg, stranded in a dark crevasse high on a mountain decides that the only way he might survive is to go further down the crevasse and see if there is a way out as he could not climb up. The alternative was death. He goes deeper in and somehow finds an exit. He then crawls for days across an icefall and down the mountain. An amazing story. In much less dramatic circumstances, I decided that I needed to keep going and risk everything I had, my money, my relationships, my businesses.

And just when I hit rock bottom, it all started to turn around…suddenly the businesses were working (some of them anyway). I had cash coming into the businesses and had this amazing clarity on how to make a business succeed. I managed to sell a few of the businesses that were doing well and I had some cash which I put into an investment holding company and used as a start to go raise more money to do more deals. I realized that it was all the little things that I learned and applied that in their entirety and together were the formula I was searching for.

The Quickening

If you want to make it big in the entrepreneurial world you will likely have to go through what I call ‘The Quickening’ (some of you might know this from a famous 1980’s movie?). It will be the most difficult thing you have ever done. I worked as an aerospace engineer and after my undergraduate degree, I thought that everything would be easy…till I left the corporate world and started my own companies. This is when the process starts and how long it takes depends on a number of factors — your passion, your focus and your resources.

If you can get out on the other side and still have the same passion and drive and the process does not destroy your spirit you will be massively successful in life. I can almost guarantee it. Ask any entrepreneur you know and they will tell you the same.

In this process, you will understand what it is to not have a cent in your pocket and stress about paying people and bills and surviving week to week. This is the push that is necessary for you to understand the true value of money and how to make it. What is your business model that really adds value and how to keep innovating to meet market changes? How to focus on your current business horizon and branding, sales and marketing, (what we term as the Attract-Engage-Converge or AEC process, something we teach in our program) which is your core business as an entrepreneur. And how to really use your resources to maximum effect and get the best out of people without large budgets. How to work with partners and how to enjoy your life while doing all of this.

It can be a long painful process but the people who you see who are successful are the ones who have been through this quickening.

When I started my journey, I embarked on a mission to create a business that would be sustainable, would be able to cope with the rapid market changes, one that would help and promote entrepreneurs and that would be built upon my values where people can grow and really achieve their dreams. Today I have developed a system that we use for all the businesses in The Business Collective and it is called The High Performing Business Roadmap (HPBR).

The High Performing Business Roadmap

The HPBR is a result of over 20 years of experience in building businesses across a variety of sectors and geographies and is a system used by all our portfolio companies today. We’ve taken everything we know about running businesses and converted it into an easy to follow step by step system that entrepreneurs can use at their own pace that will guide them along the well-beaten path to building a high performing business. I created the system because when I started investing in companies, I realized that the entrepreneurs were struggling with the very same things that I struggled with when I started and I needed to show them what I had learned.

Stay tuned for the next post where I lay out our formula for success…