Most entrepreneurs and small business owners started out their careers working for someone else. You might have had a career for 5 years or 50 years before you decided to start your own business. Or you may even be working for someone else even as you struggle to develop your own business in your spare time.
Working for someone else is fundamentally different from working for yourself.
There is an employee mindset
and an entrepreneur mindset and
they are markedly different.
If you have been working for many years for someone else,
you may not realize that there is a difference in mindset.
The longer you’ve worked as an employee,
the harder it is to change this mindset and start thinking like an entrepreneur. However, the employee mindset may not serve you well as a business owner.
In fact, it can work against you to guarantee that your business never reaches fruition.
As an employee, it is easy to blame others in an organization for responding too slowly, for missing opportunity
You are solely responsible for all things, good or bad. Entrepreneurs create something from nothing, with freedom to chart their path. You are the sole creator of that destiny.
As an employee, you were likely responsible for delivering tasks or accomplishing short-term goals, but you were likely not responsible for the long term goals of the company
As an entrepreneur, you have to focus on both short term and long term goals and vision at the same time
As an employee, you likely did not make decisions that had the biggest impact to your company’s bottom line. Also, you likely had a team of other people you worked with to make decisions.
Discomfort is the new reality. You don’t have all the answers, and you likely need to make quick decisions with very little input from others.
As an employee, you had a narrow scope in terms of your job. Any training you completed likely was directly related to your role
As an entrepreneur you have to wear many hats – project manager, sales, finance, marketing, IT, etc.
As an employee, you toed the line – following orders from above.
As an entrepreneur, you aren’t interested in the status quo. You always look for ways to improve.
These are some of the key differences between the employer and entrepreneur mindsets
Next week we look at the small business owner mindset versus the entrepreneur mindset.