Entrepreneurs have a different perspective and I have seen that there is a considerable amount of difference in perspective when it comes to being an employee and being an entrepreneur or an employer. I saw the change in me when I moved from being an employee to an entrepreneur and now being an employer, I see lot similar approach in employees.
As an example office on Saturdays, means there is an upset in moods for employees for whatever reason. It happened to me as well when I was an employee but not because I did not wanted to work and hangout with friends but because I always had plans to do something for my own sites on weekends.
As of today if I prefer writing for my blog on weekends because those are the days when I don’t responds to clients unless anything critical.
So if you want to be moving from being an employee to becoming an entrepreneur, the viewpoint needs a change and if you cannot change your viewpoint, it would be almost impossible to make a move from being an employee to becoming an entrepreneur. So lets see what perspectives needs to change
Perspective #1. Being Accountable
As an employee, you may not be accountable for everything and you can always redirect the accountability to others including your team leader, project manager but when you are an entrepreneur, you are not only accountable for what you do but you are even accountable for what your employee did or rather they actually delivered irrespective of what you asked them to do.
Perspective #2. Love What You Do
As an employee, you may not love what you have been told to do but you may do it because you want to be paid but as an entrepreneur, you should always love what you are doing. Getting started with any business requires long hours of work and dedication and it may not be easy for you to get long hours unless you love what you are doing.
I was working for almost 100 hours per week when I was an employee for the first 4 years or so. When as I got back from my job, I used to work on my websites, write content, develop things I needed for my websites, read lot of other blogs and books and so on and so forth. Never felt like I was working for myself because I loved doing that. Still I work for almost 60 hours a week and still don’t feel like I am doing anything just because I love what I am doing.
Perspective #3. Stats is Everything
Being an employee all you care is – having a job the next day, the next week, the next month … It can be achieved if you are assigned to a project, which is long lasting and is profitable. As an entrepreneur you need to focus on lot of metrics. How is the top line performing, what’s your bottom line, how you can improve on your top line and bottom line, where can you get more clients to grow your bottom line, what are policies of the government that can help or harm you and this list can be never ending.
Perspective #4. Visionary and Action
As an employee, if something you see that may not work you tends to gossip about it over a cup of coffee in the cafeteria or over a lunch with your colleague but as an entrepreneur, you take needed action to make sure you correct it as soon as possible or else it may just cost you the complete business.
One of my employers assigned me to a project, which was huge project, and everyone was so excited about it. It was development of some super cool framework so we can easily add lot more functionality to the actual product by just dragging and dropping. When I was assigned to the project, I was also very excited about it but always had one question in my mind. People don’t buy our product because of the functionality in a product but because of robustness of the product. Why are we investing so much on functionality aspect of it? After few years when I left the company, I found that the super cool framework is shelved.
Perspective #5. Learning Curve
As an employee, you may only be focused on learning new technologies to keep you updated for your task but an entrepreneur; you may need to be focusing on learning everything that comes your way. Working with Excel to marketing your products to moving onto some unfamiliar technology and the list goes on.
Final Thoughts
Do you have a mindset of an entrepreneur?
If your answer is yes and if you are thinking about moving from being an employee to an entrepreneur, and only thing that is stopping you from being an entrepreneur is finance, think once again. As you grow old, your financial requirements will always increase and not decrease. You may not be able to save more lately than today and so this is the moment when you should be taking the needed action. This is the moment to test things out and don’t let it linger for too long.
If you don’t have the mindset of an entrepreneur, there is nothing much that you can do.
So I will ask once again, do you have a mindset of an entrepreneur? Share your views in comments below.