“Incorrect assumptions that seeing is believing makes us susceptible to visual deceptions.” -Kathleen Hall Jamieson
A bird behind a closed glass window sees freedom outside and assumes that there’s nothing in between. It flies into the hard glass surface, hurts itself, and realizes the existence of a danger it was not aware of.
Most budding entrepreneurs dream of building a startup that will become a unicorn someday.
Being starry-eyed, they visualize rolling in money, getting some investors to provide generous funds, having a business where others work from them, and they lead a luxurious lifestyle doing very little themselves.
They see and hear about many successful entrepreneurs who have achieved that kind of a dream. But they often don’t know the reality, the actual road map that they’ve to follow, and the long, grunt work they must do to build such an enterprise.
Psychologists say that wrong assumptions often originate from ‘cognitive bias’ or ‘limited beliefs’ that hinder a clear view of the road ahead.
In this article, I will highlight the five common wrong assumptions they make versus reality. If you can identify with these thoughts, read till the end. It can open your eyes.
Reality: It’s a limited belief.
Example: The Bendy Smartphone
In 2012, Cambridge Graphene Lab came up with the idea of making smartphones that can bend like a piece of paper. The picture looked attractive because who wouldn’t want to wrap their smartphones around their wrists when they don’t want to hold their phone in hand?
Several companies like Blue Smartphones, Nokia, Sharp, Sony, and LG started working on Graphene technology to manufacture the phones.
Reality: People didn’t care about that product. The reasons were:
1.Wearable devices (Gears) started appearing in the market, and they integrated useful apps like health monitoring and weather at affordable prices.
2.Blue Smartphone’s fundraising for their ‘Bendy’ flopped when investors found that their Kickstarter fund requirement didn’t even cover the cost of R&D, let alone production.
Reality: Nothing could be further from the truth.
No one can run a business alone. If you start a business after doing planning and due diligence, and you’ve got the passion for making it a reality, you’ll be able to attract the right co-founder or a co-founding team who can complement your knowledge and skills.
Fact: Most successful businesses started with a shoestring budget and hardly needed any external funds.
Example: Shopify’s founders started working on their passion of building an efficient Ecommerce site for snowboarders, with a bit of money out of their savings and a grand vision. They built their platform on Ruby on The Rails themselves and ran the business profitably for six years. They raised Venture Capital and subsequently issued an IPO. Thus an enterprise with a 14 billion dollar valuation was built from scratch.
Here is a list of 17 businesses that don’t require much capital to start successfully.
1.Art & Craft
2.Home-made food
3.Niche beauty products
4.Blogging
5.Freelancing
6.Coaching, Consulting & Tutorials
7.Day Care
8.Pet Care
9.Astrology
10.Handyman services
11.Lawn & Garden Services
12.Cleaning services
13.Delivery services
14.Carpentry
15.Masonry
16.Designing
17.Interior decoration
18.Financial consulting
The list is not exhaustive and there are many other scalable businesses that don’t need major investment.
Don’t underestimate the potential of the above businesses because each is scalable and can become a multi-million dollar enterprise with the correct strategy and entrepreneurship skills.
Reality: The imagination of having total freedom of dependency on others feels great.
But the journey of an entrepreneur is not linear. The ecosystem has a matrix structure where several actions take place simultaneously. Executing everything all by yourself is not just overwhelming but impossible as well.
So, you need to have a support team in place and be ready to outsource jobs regularly.
Fact: The trajectory of a business is not a straight line. Ups and downs are expected.
It’s like an aircraft’s flight path. While the goal of reaching destinations/landmarks remains fixed, the deviations take place. Market responses, Government policies, geopolitical changes, pandemics… can try to put you off-tract all the time.
Sometimes it may seem that your business is failing.
A true entrepreneur never gets unnerved by those kinds of fluctuations.
You can quickly correct your course and get back on track, provided you have a cockpit dashboard in front of you. In business, we call it a ‘Growth Scorecard.’
The Growth Scorecard is a tool to check on your business metrics at regular and frequent intervals.
Most entrepreneurs don’t commit their resources to track their business scores and get the alarm when it can be too late.
I shall talk about creating and implementing this latest business tool in a separate article.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this article and got some insights into the core of Entrepreneurship.
Please put your comments or questions below, and I shall reply at the earliest.
