3 Mistakes to Avoid When You Become an Entrepreneur

By Dr. Tyra Seldon

If you are currently in a career and thinking about transitioning to entrepreneurship or if you have started a company as a second career then there is no point reinventing the wheel when it comes to making mistakes, especially when they are preventable.

As I have shared before, I became an entrepreneur in my late thirties. I did it “on the side” for many years before realizing that I wanted to pursue it in a full-time capacity. My transition was methodical, but it wasn’t smooth.

I am a researcher my extension of my formal training, so one of the first things that I did was research entrepreneurship. Almost everything that I read was geared towards a much younger demographic or those who were launching their first careers as entrepreneurs. There were numerous pieces about getting experience, building a brand, and leveraging social media to build one’s clientele. All of this was valuable and proved to be helpful at various stages during my transition, but I wasn’t receiving what I needed.

I didn’t want to start a company just to do it.  Entrepreneurship was never intended to be a fun hobby; it was to become my livelihood.

I wanted to thrive and to sustain the quality of life that I had grown accustomed to as an academic. Then reality hit. There were many opportunities, but the pay was very low. Clearly there were those who were exploiting the fact that many younger writers would write for less money. It wasn’t fair, but it was a reality.

One night, I even calculated how many low paying articles I would have to write in a week’s time just to make a fraction of what I was making before. My heart sunk—maybe I was being foolish and this life was not for me, at least not at my age. Clearly, I was doing something wrong. I had the skill set; I had a portfolio full of diverse samples; and I had a vision, but the income was not coming in. Something was missing. I assumed that with my credentials and years of experience, I simply had to let people know that I was now an entrepreneur and they would respond accordingly. Wrong!

I am not an essentialist, so I don’t believe that only people of a certain group can speak about/for that group. However, real-world life experiences sprinkled with candor carry far more weight than an intriguing Internet article. So, I reached out to a dear friend who had also left academia and launched a successful second career as a creative independent in his early 40s. As I explained my level of frustration and expressed a desire to just quit, he listened attentively. As the conversation unfolded and he asked some probing questions,  I realized that I was making several mistakes.

Therefore, I highly recommend that you ask/answer these questions to avoid some of the pitfalls that many neophyte entrepreneurs  make.

• Do You Know Your Market? I was being too restrictive and I needed to diversify the types of writing projects and clients that I wanted to work with. The nature of entrepreneurship is such that, for many of us, we can live anywhere and work from anywhere. I was concentrating too much on building up my local clientele. Yes, I am in the Midwest; however, I have a service that is of value for people on the coasts, places in-between, and overseas. As such, I had to rethink how I was marketing my services and to whom I was marketing them to.

 

• Are You Underestimating Your Ability or Skills? I was only focusing on two streams of income—dissertation coaching and curriculum writing. It dawned on me that I had also developed pretty acute editing skills (all of those years of grading English papers and teaching grammar in intro to writing courses), so I added editing to my toolbox of services. This created an additional stream of income. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of having diverse income streams—some people even refer to these as profit centers. The value of this is that if one area is not producing enough income, you will still have revenue coming in from another stream of income.

 

• Do You Understand Systems? This brings me to the biggest mistake that many people make when transitioning: entrepreneurship is not the same as working for someone else. When you have worked within a system for most of your adult life, you grow accustomed to the processes that work within that system. For example, having a supervisor, having structure, having a built-in accounting system, earning paid time off, receiving merit pay, and enjoying cost of living increases are often outgrowths of working for someone else. When you strip away that system and find yourself in a new space, you have to change your way of thinking. I had to think about writing as art and as commerce. If I wanted to enjoy the benefits of writing as a business, I had to treat it as a business enterprise. This meant that I had to create systems. Why? If you build it, they still may not come and when they do, you need to be ready.

These mistakes were preventable, but I really didn’t know that at the time.  They were valuable, yet costly, exercises that reinforced that what worked in the academic/education space (my first career) would not necessarily work in the world of free enterprise.  So, before you launch your second career as an entrepreneur, take the time to find someone who has a track record of doing what you desire to do. Seek the advice or counsel of others. Learn from that person’s mistakes and successes.

One conversation, when I was on the cusp of giving up, was the turning point for me.