"Push past the fear of risk to reach success." Easier said than done, right? Well, not when you're a determined entrepreneur.
Take Adam, a young, professional business owner I know. He didn't start out with a dream. He started out with wish: to get better. His illness drained him of nearly everything - except one very important thing: a drive to heal himself and to help others heal as well.
When Adam started the jüs bar - a 100% fruit and vegetable juice bar, he risked more than most. "Risk is different for everyone" Adam explains. "Some people can climb mountains with no harness, while others check every store within 5 miles just to make sure they don't overspend on an item. While it's true that we are intuitively more risk-averse, these are some ways to push past the fear of the risky."
Adam suggests these 7 ways to make risk work for--rather than against--you:
Ignite your passion
Most people will never understand and experience their true passion. Nearly every entrepreneur does. Passion is more than just a hobby you enjoy, or a job you're really good at. Passion burns through your soul. It becomes a part of you. You obsess about it. Dream about it. Realize you missed dinner because of it. But most importantly, you believe with ever fiber in your body that it will work. When you are truly passionate about something, risk becomes irrelevant because you know you will do whatever it takes to make sure success is the only option.
The world as you know it is not set in stone
When you can grasp the concept that you can have a huge influence on society, you are way ahead of the game. The world was not created by people smarter than you, who made the rules and you now get to play by them. If you have a good product that people have use for, or offer a great service, and you can do it better than the other guys, people will come to you. Figure out how you can make something better than everyone else, you'd be surprised just how far ahead of the competition you can get.
Don't be afraid of the big guys
It can be scary going in business against huge corporations who have seemingly endless resources and money to squash you like a bug. But often they're more afraid of you than you are of them. Market conditions and consumer perception are constantly changing, and your being small can actually work to your advantage. You can turn on a dime and adapt your business to suit you consumer's needs almost instantly. The big guys have to have countless meetings, meet with each department, argue until there's finally at least partial consensus, and get hundreds or thousands of people to change course together. This can takes months or even years to accomplish, and by that time you could already have the new market in the palm of your hand.
Create a Flexible Business Plan
Start thinking fluidly. Many businesses get caught up in their original goal and refuse to accept that what was good last year may be completely irrelevant today. Hewlett-Packard started by making audio equipment. Apple essentially made circuit boards. Starbucks just sold coffee beans. Writing a non-flexible business plan keeps you locked in the past when you should always be looking toward the future.
Start at the finish
Think about where you want to be: Flying across the country in your private jet, spending two weeks in Hawaii with your family, being able to write a huge check to your favorite charity. Now work backwards. This way you get to see your reward, which motivates you, and it can be easier to see the direction you need to take in order to get there, which makes it less scary than staring blindly into the abyss.
Ship
Steve Jobs said it best: Real entrepreneurs ship. Don't get stuck analyzing everything to death. Don't budget down to the paperclips. Things will go wrong. Nobody did everything perfectly the first time. So stop thinking about it and just do it. Often, you'll find that the things you were worried about aren't that bad when you actually do it.
Make many mistakes
The more mistakes you make, the better off you'll be, because you'll start understanding why things can't be done that way, and why they need to be done a different way. When you understand the why, the "what" gets easy. Mistakes aren't failures, they're battle wounds. And the guy who comes home with the most battle wounds is usually the one most admired, because people know he had the guts to put himself in the middle of the fight in order to better society for everyone.
At 21, Adam talks the walk. His motto? "Live 100%". You can't do that without taking risks.
There's no safety net in life, but you can have a safety net in business. It's called a business coach, and more and more business owners are discovering what athletic teams have discovered - it's tough to win without a good coach guiding you.
I'm reminded of a line from a limerick a baker told me when explaining why he decided to hire a business coach. He said he'd just opened up a bakery in a supermarket: "I decided to risk it and went as a biscuit, and got eaten in the aisle by a hog."
Don't get eaten alive. Call a coach.
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As a Master Licensee for ActionCOACH, our team of coaches help business owners affordably reach their goals by providing each with proven strategies to move their businesses forward. My 25+ years of business experience includes domestic and international ventures and business ownership. Email: peterwilliamson@actioncoach.com
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