5 things no one told me before starting my own business 🤦‍♀️

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First, getting to the point of saying, "You know what? I'm done." it's a whole process with ups and downs.

Gaining clarity and being reflective of your situation is essentially doing everything backward.

You will turn your back on everything seen as excellent and aspirational. Unlearning everything you've been told all your life.

The switch happened when I realized how many empty trophies I had.

We live in a time where most people aren't given any decent money education, where underqualified teachers are poorly assigned to guide and shape us into working adults, and more often than not, there is a huge gap between who we end up being and what we have and our dreams.

And starting your own business without experience, knowledge, or support is probably the bravest thing anyone can do.

It's like ripping a bandage off and seeing what happens afterward.

One of the first things I learned after starting my own business is to make friends with failure. Things aren't gonna run themselves smoothly just because you can think about it in a perfect vacuum.

Mistakes that can happen will happen, and even those that shouldn't.

Here are five things I wish someone had told me before going head first into starting my own business.

1. Switching from an employee mentality to an employer takes quite a while

If all you're life you've been training to sit straight in line and learn how to do things exactly like everyone else, your whole identity is centered around using this model of compliance to get by in life.

In Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, by James Clear, the author insists that doing something little daily can define a big part of your life.

What you do each day builds up your habits, these represent you, and they also have the last word in whether you will be closer or further away from success.

Well, if you allocated many of your daily habits to working on someone else's success, making the change to start working towards yours, it's an emotional rollercoaster.

To get any results, you will need to do a whole identity shift to reprogram yourself in a self-centered and self-serving way.

Even reading the sentence above, you might get an awful feeling because it probably attacks your way of defining yourself. "How can I be self-centered and self-serving? That's selfish. I'm a good person; a good person does x."

That's just one of the many programs you will need to reset because they are not there to improve your life. Someone put those thoughts there to serve a purpose; something's fishy if the goal doesn't align with your intentions for yourself.

The person that employs others requires a whole new set of skills that were never a priority in the educational system or the media we consume. So walking on that path will require a lot of freestyling until you can feel confident embodying the person you're growing into.

Sure, you can be better than your former boss; you can give pay raises, be friendly with your employees, and do everything your boss didn't do for you.

But then, your center goal isn't so much about running your business effectively. Balance is required in everything; getting it right might take years of trial and error.  

At the same time, you don't need to employ anybody to go through this. Working for yourself can be just as tricky because you can easily give yourself a lot of slack to prove a point and end up procrastinating or not seeing much progress.

You're juggling not only being employed but also being the employer.

Overthinking like one or another will 100% cause problems. You can't just clock out at 5 PM anymore, and that steady paycheck (as undervalued as it might be and soul-draining) will not come at the end of the month. As well as, you can't just avoid any conflict just to be seen as a good boss by yourself or others.

Your business will become a life-long story of self-improvement that never hits a plateau.

When you think you finally got it right, there is another mountain to claim, another slide that needs reprogrammed.

2. You'll treat your first clients as your boss

As I said in the last point, daily habits greatly define how you talk about yourself, in essence, how you see yourself and act.

Because that muscle memory is so strong, things can get quite challenging now that you're in new territory.

This tendency to fall back on this behavior comes not only from your job but from college, university, high school, and all of these institutions where there is always someone higher that needs to be pleased with your performance.

In time you will realize that you can constantly readjust your expectations and reevaluate your progress entirely differently and in a more non-restrictive way.

But initially, getting your first clients can seem like getting a new boss every other day. And alongside them comes the same frustration you left, amplified.

Whether you sell products or services, you will soon have to deal with refunds and customer complaints without losing your grip, or trying to manage a difficult client that's very hard to work with can be highly demotivating as you're starting.

The problem is not with the business itself or that you took the wrong step in pursuing this in the first place.

What's missing is your confidence as a new entrepreneur to set boundaries with your clients and customers.

Saying no seems like a scary thing. But in reality, saying yes to everything doesn't make you a better person or more likable.

When I first found out there is such a thing called "firing your client," it blew my mind. I just never imagined that you could hold that much power and not need to bend yourself at every single request.

Essential takeaway: do NOT bend yourself into a pretzel. 🙅‍♀️🥨

3. There is only one difference between having a job and owning a business that genuinely matters

This would make a lot of sense if you worked in any agency, creative or marketing, and it doesn't matter. But it can be applied to any industry, more or less, if you have the right POV and a bit of creativity.

If you work as a web designer, you will probably be assigned new clients from time to time. Your workflow would be defined through straightforward tasks you have to complete before setting deadlines while collaborating with various members of the team that take care of other tasks.

The problem with this approach is that we're not made to get stuck in one place and do the same repetitive tasks forever.

Even with the little room left for your input, it still reaches a dead end where your mind starts to wonder: what if I can learn how to do this button, or maybe why don't I design the front banner, or write the about us page, perhaps even get wild and write code for some applications.

If you allow yourself to grow outside of your box and learn more than what others expect out of you, staying in one place will soon enough start to become unbearable.

The main reason that I think our generation is going through The Great Resignation is that the model of how we collaborate is not a ladder.

Where someone sits higher than others, the new ways the modern workplace has to reinvent itself to survive will redefine everything we know about work structure.

If you have the will to learn and grow, the difference between working for someone else and working for yourself is becoming self-reliant.

This means you can deliver the whole project by creating a system where the success rate is measurable and has predictable timeframes regarding how long it will take to complete the project.

✅ Master your product delivery

You must manage manufacturing, delivery, packaging, and costs if you have a physical product.

Maintaining quality will be generally more manageable as it's not a service-based model. But it works on the same principle of being able to deliver a valuable product from start to finish to your customer base.

If you're selling a digital product, the efficiency will improve as you don't have to deal with manufacturing costs, suppliers, quality control, delivery issues, returns, or supply chain shortages—none of those.

And in essence, if you know how to do something digitally, it can be packaged into a product one way or another, be it in a digital download like an ebook, pdf, or a website template, social media templates, photoshop brushes, iPad planners, mini-course or training, the list goes on.

Other than the initial effort, you won't have to deal with a lot of the restrictions of the physical products.

Maybe you can give your products seasonal updates in 2.0 versions, offering discounts for people that bought your initial version and use it as a strategy to keep your products up to date.

You can sell memberships or access chat groups, email lists, and courses.

Digital products allow a lot of freedom to reinvent your business and optimize your offer.

You must master your delivery process if you offer a service-based product. This applies to social media management, Facebook ads, Google ads, content creation, video production, etc.

✅ Learn HOW TO SELL before you do anything else

If you want to start a business, you probably already have a skill or two; polishing them into offers for your clients will not be a difficult task.

Realizing early on that you can't rely on the sales team to bring in clients or customers is crucial for your business's survival.

You are on the sales team now.

Plenty of courses on Udemy teach you how to sell and write copy that sells.

If there is one thing you will remember from this article, it's this: LEARN SALES.

None of your other efforts will matter if you don't know how to make your offer visible and attractive.

After you understand how to be persuasive, you can learn marketing funnels and how to be present on social media.

Without understanding the basics of sales, all marketing or social media efforts will be useless.

The difference between having a job and owning a business is that now you have to take care of other departments yourself:

• Sales: You will have to get great at marketing your business and closing clients

• Product Delivery: You will have to develop a process to ensure the client gets the product or service they bought at the same level of quality each time

• Admin: Making sure that you're turning in a profit, managing taxes, sending invoices, onboarding clients, and all the administrative parts of the business

4. Picking up the wrong partners will delay progress

We have established so far that starting a business is very similar to a self-reinvention journey, where you're fighting against your old beliefs to grow into a new self-reliant version of yourself.

If you're going through this whole identity transition, tagging along with someone that's just as confused as you are might not be a great idea.

Now, the two of you are going through this discovery journey where patience is demanded.

If you're going into business with someone that has more experience than you, frustration and even competition can be something that will come up if you don't know how to manage your emotions.

If you're going into business with someone with less experience, they can develop inferiority complexes and shut down when it's time to deal with failure or issues.

It's, as with everything on this list, a double-ended sword.

Things can go south quickly, and delays that will last weeks or months will happen and slow progress.

Choosing a partner with that you can solve conflicts efficiently and quickly is probably the best bet you will have to make if you want to go on this journey with someone else.

Mistakes and problems will arise, and how you deal with them will make or break the business.

Experience, connections, achievements, friendship, none of these matter if you can't balance work life together, mediate conflict efficiently, delegate tasks, share administrative issues, and celebrate your success and growth together.

You will spend a lot of time with this person and get very close to them on this journey.

Building your business with them is making a large chunk of your life reliant on your ability to work together.

So proceed with caution.  

5. Finding the right offer it's a never-ending process

Finding a profitable product in demand with high volume might make you feel like you struck gold. But you'll see that if it drains resources and time ineffectively, the product is probably not fit for you, even if it's fit for the market.

After you find a product that people want to buy from you, without a proper delivery system, you will soon find yourself burned out and overwhelmed.

You have to learn quickly how to hire people, manage teams, delegate work, and essentially teach other people to keep up with how fast your business is growing. You might even need to hire professionals who know better how to tackle a part of the business for you.

So you will find yourself killing your growth and starting from zero to readjust a part that's not clicking just yet.

Even if you find the perfect balance, you have a product that sells; you can keep up with the growth and have time to catch your breath. There are always improvements that can be made— the process of refining your offer never ends truly.

Keeping your mind open for refinement opportunities will make you highly competitive in the market.

The second you stop, you are vulnerable to either becoming outdated or hitting a plateau in the following months simply because that edge of relevance is gone.

This makes me a bit hopeful that maybe starting a business with the "perfect" offer is an illusion that justifies a perfectionist loop.

So perhaps just starting and having a process-based approach will release some of that initial stage panic.

Conclusion

• Don't expect to be ready for everything that you will encounter on your journey of running a business.  

• Treat your business like a self-discovery journey, and you will understand your issues faster.

• Expect mistakes to happen and be ready to solve them, don't oppose resistance.

• You shouldn't be discouraged if things don't go your way.

• Pick your partners carefully, and focus on your ability to solve problems with them.

• Don't treat your business like your job. Use your experience as a reference but not as an applied model.

• Leave room for experimenting and constantly improve your offer.