Why do you not want to get a regular 9 to 5 job? Whats wrong with having a stable income? What compels you to be an entrepreneur when you there are so many perks of being an employed personnel?
A few of the many questions that people tend to ask Entrepreneurs. But what they don’t understand is that, we didn’t give up on the corporate world, it was the corporate world that failed us.
The corporate world offers many perks, with fixed income and stability ranking top of the list. But from an entrepreneurs perspective, those mean little. To the deranged few who rather work 16 hours a day for themselves than to work 8 hours for someone else, and even potentially even earning lesser (at least at the start), job stability means little. What is important to these group of people is the freedom and ability to do what they want or know would work.
The corporate world is good at creating people people, people who are great with other people. And it’s not that Entrepreneurs arent that, they just usually value results more than people. Theres an old Warren Buffet saying that went “Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.” And in some sense, the same goes for working in a MNC, where one often finds themselves trying to explain to their bosses and the many layers why an idea would work.
Case in point, try justifying the cost of getting photography equipment and explaining why better equipment would get better photos that lead to better sales figure to a CFO who does not understand marketing or sales or have taken a photo in their life. The case is the same for many specialist who has to explain to their bosses, the finance team, the sales team, the IT team etc on why one thing would work. People who have a proven track record of doing successful projects from the ground up has have to explain the rationale of their plan to people who have never done it.
And to get the approval of a plan to proceed, one would have to gain the common consensus of a huge group of people. But the thing is that good ideas, life changing, ground breaking ideas rarely get the census from the general public. If Bill Gates or Jack Ma depended on general consensus, Windows and Alibaba would have never been born.
“There’s no secret. I worked really hard on my idea to get it as good as I could, and then knocked on door after door. I ended up showing my idea to 1200 people. 900 said no. 300 people showed some interest. Only 85 people actually did anything. 30 took a serious look. And 11 made me a multi-millionaire.“
-Bill Gates
To top it off, failing in the corporate world means devastation. Your year end bonus is affected and career progression halted. People in the corporate world are discouraged to fail whereas entrepreneurs fail all the time. Failing is learning and learning means doing it better the next time round. Our Digital marketing agency has failed a 10,000 times running ads on our travel blog that didn’t work. but what we learnt from that 10,000 times, helped us make our 10,001 ad onwards outperform everyone elses, as compared to how we probably would have been fired by the 10th ad that didn’t work in a corporate world.
It isn’t that entrepreneurs don’t like having a fixed income, it’s just for the most of us, it’s the freedom and the drive to make a vision come true that means more to us. To launch a campaign not because I know it works, but to please people and different stakeholders, I don’t quite know how to do that.
