Very often we receive messages from our followers asking for a step-by-step guide to entrepreneurship. While we are working to update our business center with state-of-the-art material about various topics that are needed in order to succeed in business; creating a step-by-step guide to entrepreneurship is impossible. My book Third Circle Theory gives good insight into the prequel to entrepreneurship and how to tweak your own life enough to increase your chances for success ten fold; however, it does not teach entrepreneurship step-by-step. So why is there no book or resource out there that can teach this step-by-step? Is it because of the hundreds of industries all being different from one another? Or perhaps it’s that all people start from different baselines?
To be honest with you, it’s none of the above.
The reality is that business is black and white and about profit, and there is a system to that process of making revenue in a business.
On the other hand, entrepreneurship is about value creation and innovation, and it comes down to being resourceful and creating something from nothing.
With that being said, every person’s path to becoming an entrepreneur is about having the opportunity to create structure within chaos. As a result, an idea becomes a reality and eventually, a business.
If we use this same line of thinking to describe why there is no roadmap for entrepreneurship, it’s because the whole idea is for you to create a roadmap that doesn’t exist. If it already existed and was already out there, then it would be business, not entrepreneurship, which takes me to the idea that perhaps more people everywhere confuse the concept of entrepreneurship with business. While the two share many similarities, it is also true that they are very different in the earlier stages of conception.
Most businesses come with pre-determined structures, regulations, and precedents.
Think about a restaurant for example, and the location being one of the key determining factors of its success or failure. There is data out there based on food, demographics, and a thousand other things that can tell you within a few days if the location is a fit for the type of food and the customer base.
On the other hand, take the same restaurant idea and location but all of a sudden decide to serve some incredibly weird food in a manner that no one has ever heard of, and every study or data out there that once applied to restaurants is no longer valid. You effectively introduced something that didn’t exist previously, and it will require time and effort to gain the confidence and support from your clients to be a proven concept.
Italian food or Thai food or being in the restaurant business is not a new concept, and there are things you can do to guarantee survival. The rewards are good, but limited as everyone else is also doing the same thing.
This is a typical case of “if you do the work, it will happen,” but in the chaotic world of entrepreneurship, even hard work can lead you to nothing. You may spend months trying to gain acceptance of your idea with no response from your clients or the market you serve.
While it may seem harsh, the upside is that the reward, should you succeed, will be significantly more than the reward of a traditional business because you are the pioneer, the one who made the exception the rule and the one who pushed an idea forward that others can now follow.
