Having studied at a premier b-school, it is easy to notice how many people admire entrepreneurship and those who commit themselves to it. It is however tough to say what part of it do they admire the most – the inherent risks that you take, the guts of leaving a cozy job and doing something of your own, trying to do something more meaningful in life, the opportunity to make lots of money, the freedom and calling your own shots part of it or the loving what you do part of it. There are also those who admire what you do because they can’t do something similar. Bit ironic, isn’t it? Why can’t we as a country produce lot more entrepreneurs than those admiring them? I think we need to understand the biggest stumbling block. In my view, there are three main stages to entrepreneurship:
Step 1 – This is where you come up with a good business model. Well not that what you come up with is going to remain the same, most ideas evolve with time, still it is imperative that you have something good to start with. It’s important to make something work on paper before you can make it work on ground. Even though this is not an easy step, it is not the one where most people stumble.
Step 2 – In my view, this is the most critical stage which filters most people. This is where we you actually take the first step towards starting something of your own. It involves talking to your family, may involve quitting or not taking a job, letting go of your financial freedom and getting into the frame of mind of becoming an entrepreneur. And certain things make this crossing this stage even more difficult – for instance the more time you’ve spent in your current job the more difficult it becomes to let it go. Or to some extent even doing an MBA makes you over think about the competitive advantage of your idea, replicability of the model and its long term sustenance. It gives many people a lot of valid and invalid reasons to justify not going ahead and staying in comfort of their present life. And as they say - If you were to wait for all lights to turn green before you leave your home, well then you may never be able to leave home.
Step 3 – Unlike the previous step where it depends entirely up to you to go ahead or convince your family, this step depends very little on you. This is where you actually make the business model work (execution). Now any business involves dealing with people, making a product or service which people will use and hence in that process develops many external dependencies. There are also environmental factors, government regulations, economy etc that can play a critical role. This is usually a longest step and one that requires patience because there is limited amount of things you can do yourself. The rest depends on business externalities. But what is most important is that you keep evolving and self correcting your business, learning new things and hope to be at right place at right time!
