In making the transition from employee to entrepreneur, a driving concern is often a desire for certainty. "Is becoming an entrepreneur the best move for me?" and "Will I make enough money to survive?" are questions that come up time and time again.
For that reason, it's only natural that you want assurance that the business you start is the "right" one. After all, you will pour time, energy and other valuable resources into your fledgling enterprise with the intention of its supporting you in return.
As much as I would love to provide the secret formula for choosing a no-risk business that will 100 percent support you, I can't because it doesn't exist.
Merriam Webster defines entrepreneur as: "one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise".
When starting a business, the risks come as part of the deal. It can be nerve-wracking, but it's also part of the beauty that makes up the world of entrepreneurship. The risks are there to hone you and call forth skills and abilities that you didn't know you had. As you breathe life into your business, you will learn what it needs to thrive. You will learn that sometimes all your business needs is small tweaks to remain viable. Other times it may require wholesale structural changes. There may even be a time when the best course of action is to wind it down, take what you've learned and start again. It's an unnatural process for someone used to being an employee, but one that gets easier over time.
Entrepreneurship is about taking an idea on a journey. It's about creating form and substance out of the idea, and learning how to respond as the environment around it changes.
Although there's no magic formula on starting the "perfect" business, I can give you some pointers on how to move towards the direction of becoming an entrepreneur.
It all starts with the things that you are passionate about.
What fires you up?
What could you spend hours on end doing, reading about and focusing on?
How do you love to show up in and interact with the world?
Allowing your mind to call forth answers to these questions is a great way to get started. At this point, your ideas will be in embryonic stage so they may not look like much (e.g., "I like being outside in nature," or "I like interacting with people,"). However, these snatches of thoughts can provide fertile ground for the business that you eventually do create.
That is, if you're willing to test drive your ideas.
As you populate a journal or Google doc with ideas, the next step is to work with them. Think about ways to create a business around your ideas. Talk to people about them. Pop them into Google and see what comes up. Attend a class on how to start a small business. Talk to a coach.
At this point, whether or not you start a business will directly result from your willingness to create it. As you work with your ideas, make tweaks, drop certain elements and add others, you'll watch your business begin to take shape. It's a process that's both magical and practical -- creating something out of nothing while taking determined and focused steps to get there.