There are a lot of myths about business ownership. They can take you down and crush your dreams and aspirations pretty fast if you fall for them. However, if you equip yourself with realistic expectations and understand what is really ahead of you, you can achieve far more, faster, and with a lot less stress.
Here are some of the most common myths of business ownership, and the truth about them…
It’s All About Having a Genius Business Idea
The truth is that ideas are cheap and plentiful. Few are really unique. In reality, investors and repeat entrepreneurs know that the idea isn’t nearly as important to success as being able to focus, keep it simple, and just execute on the most important tasks ahead of you.
You Have to Be First
You don’t have to be the first with an idea or first to market to create a successful business. Being the first mover can have some advantages. Yet, it can also mean you are way too early. Having other competitors in your space can help too. They create buzz for customers. They give your idea credibility with investors. They can help show you what you can do better and excel at.
You Can Do It All Yourself
We often hear that small business owners wear many hats and fill many roles. That’s not necessarily a good thing, nor a badge of honor to shout about. Those who try this approach typically stay very small businesses at best.
There is no way you can be great at everything. You can’t be a master of marketing, product, design, accounting, fundraising, sales, customer service, and managing people. No one can. If you try, you are just robbing yourself and your customers and employees of the real potential here.
It’s far better to focus your time and energy on the one thing that you can excel at more than everyone else.
The most successful business founders say that your real number one job as the CEO is to simply make sure that you don’t run out of money. Then they seem to spend the other 50% of their time recruiting. At least until you get an HR person, manager, and executive team to do that for you.
Also for fundraising, it is all about storytelling and capturing the essence of the business in 15 to 20 slides. You will need to get started with a great pitch deck template.
You Can’t Afford Top Talent Yet
It’s the business with the best team in your industry that will win. If you don’t think you can afford great talent, you definitely can’t afford cheap, second-rate hires. It is actually even more important to hire better in the early days. This will give you the ability to attract and retain prospects and customers. They will pay for themselves in the results. If you start out weak, you’ll burn the best opportunities you have, and usually won’t get a second chance.
You’ll Be The ‘Boss’
To some extent, you may be the boss. Yet, if you are going to build a company that really has the ability to grow and especially if you raise outside funding, then you’ll probably be doing less bossing around and more serving. For a start, you quickly find that you have a lot of responsibility to others. Including your investors, staff, and customers. You may even legally have to let others make the decisions. To build a great company you’ll also quickly realize that the best thing you can do is to just hire the best talent you can, and get out of their way. It’s a lot more about bringing a group of great people around a mission, and empowering them to do their best work, than being a ‘boss’.
Remember, if you bring in partners and shareholders, they can hold more voting rights than you. You are more like a modern-day monarch. Someone who is visible with a great title, who graciously announces the decisions others make behind the scenes by popular vote.
The 4-Hour Workweek
There are gigs you can start and only work four hours a week on. Though, if you want to launch a true startup that grows fast and becomes worth millions and billions of dollars, you should prepare yourself to put in far more hours and effort than the average worker. Many end up working 100 hours or seven days a week for years. So, make sure whatever you are jumping into is something you’ll enjoy doing a lot.
You Should Keep Your Business a Secret
Business owners who start fundraising or hiring conversations by asking for an NDA up front are often going nowhere. It’s a big red flag that they are green and they aren’t going to get far, and not very fast. If you really have some unique critical business secrets you can choose to keep those to yourself during the first several conversations and until you decide to do business together. Or, you can get patents and trademarks. In reality, the number one challenge facing all new businesses is awareness. You want your business to be the worst kept secret ever. The more people who know about it the better. All of your energy should probably be going into spreading the word and getting others to do the same.
Build It & They Will Come
It’s possible. Though, your odds of success are far greater if you are filling pre-orders and existing needs instead.
You Need an Office
Businesses haven’t needed a physical office to be successful or create billions in value for over a decade. More and more, we’ll see that having an office is one of the biggest liabilities and areas of loss for companies.
It’s All About a Perfect Product
No. It’s far more about marketing than the details of your product or having a perfect product.
You Need to Perfect Your Business Plan Before You Start
This is one of the most common excuses for entrepreneurs to waste months and years and end up doing nothing. You do need a viable business model in mind. Though you can do just fine with a one-page business plan and a pitch deck.
You Just Need to Earn a Little More or Get an MBA
The network of people you can build when in business school can be valuable. Though, you’ll learn a lot more a lot faster by just diving into business. You can never know everything, and everything is always changing anyway.
We Have No Competition
This is perhaps only second as deadly as believing you can compete on price alone. If you don’t think you have competition, then you probably haven’t done enough market research. If you really don’t have any yet, then you had better expect a whole lot of competitors once you are successful. Both from new startups and big corporations who can both do it cheaper than you.
