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You might be using your hands. You might be selling your brainpower. You might have invented slicier bread or a kinder mousetrap. You might even become a franchisee or a venture capitalist.
Whatever you’re doing, it’s your business. It matters more to you than anyone you could hire. And you might have to do it 24/7 – believe me, it’ll sometimes feel like it. There’ll be times when the passion fizzles and black clouds of doubt rush in.
But doubt is usually about confusion. Imagine the car you’re in hits a bump and you stop. Who’s best placed to sort it out? The one who knows the car has ‘just stopped’, the one that knows whether it’s ‘bodywork or mechanical’, or the one who can diagnose the need for an ‘offside leaf spring mounting’?
While the nerdy answer is the last one, running your own business is more like being the middle guy – knowing just enough to involve the right sort of expert to solve the problem. I’m an accountant by training and an entrepreneur by inclination, so I know that selecting the expert and briefing them on the background will make the answer the right one, and drive down the cost. And there go your black clouds.
There’s no mystique about being an accountant. I started because I was good at maths and not so good at people. I quickly discovered successful accountants are the other way round. Computers and calculators can bash out numbers and good accountants interpret them into predictions. But a great accountant does something else - lets you concentrate on running your business. Discovering what businesses are really about takes time – the best help is subtle and instinctive.
I won’t tell you what to do for a living, just how to organise it. You might be expanding a hobby, pursuing a dream or following in the family footsteps. Before you start, give your business a trial run, use your friends as guinea pigs, and try your product out at a boot fair. Get the honest opinions of those nearest, not just their encouragement, before taking the plunge. I wish you the very best of luck.
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