Hope is an essential ingredient when growing your business, so too is patience. They will get you through the inevitable dips and bumps in the journey and provide you with the bits of optimism necessary to persevere.
Patience though does not come without the work. The long hours, the worry, the working weekends negate any word-associated thinking that patience is about any waiting game. Instead it is all about action, doing, thinking re-looking, revising, pressing forward, stepping back, rethinking, doing.
11 years in Grenada I met a CEO who epitomized all of this. Joel Webbe, CEO of W&W Electronics Ltd., a high technology production company, had just Entrepreneur of the Year award when I went to Grenada to interview him. What amazed me about his story was his resilience. After painstakingly building a profitable business in 1989, it was destroyed by a volcano in Monsterrat. A year later he moved production to Grenada and watched his factory crumble to the floor during two hurricanes. Through each dip, and on the verge of bankruptcy Webbe relied on faith, family, day-in and day-out patient work to get through and rebuild.
Likewise Starbucks didn't become Starbucks without the work and mistakes necessary to become a global business. At first they plugged along with a few stores. "They raised bits of money here and there, flirted with disaster, added one store and then another, tweaked and measured and improved and repeated. Day by day, they dripped their way to success."
Writer JK Rowlings sat in coffee shops for days on end, was virtually homeless and a single mother while she worked on her book. What do the three have in common. There was no magic lottery ticket for Webbe, no silver bullet for Starbucks, no quick fix for Rowlings. Just time and a painstaking, patient kind of work.
But what of hope?
It's an ingredient I think that is even more difficult than patience to get a hold of, because hope is less tangible. When a fledgling entrepreneur rushes over to a financier who just appeared on a panel and goes into a speech about his business with the 'hope; that she will be impressed enough to write a $3 million dollar cheque, that hope is misplaced. Hope never involves shortcuts. And while it can be magical, it also suggests a precision like focus on what's important to succeed. It suggests that your work should be grounded in passion and be worthy of your energy. It dictates that what you deliver day in and out ought to be remarkable. It necessitates that you delight your audience. It demands that you work your way up. In the end what it really means is that you should follow the longer, more deliberate path and walk it one step at a time.
Every step, at the end, becomes a remarkable journey in hope.
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A strange and surprsing thing happened to our firm earlier this year, we started losing every bid for which we tossed our hat into the ring.
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...At least that’s what I felt like when the Request for Proposal (RFP) from a fairly large company landed on my desk.
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I bet you’ve seen them in the magazines. The young entrepreneurs, usually about 25. Tousled hair. Converse on their feet. Cocky. At the height of the Internet bubble in the early 90s, they were the toast of the Valley and world. They possessed a certain bravado and were determined to make millions before they turned thirty. Some of them did. Most didn’t. But the ones who survived, like the creators of Google, helped turn living-room startups into billion-dollar companies. They amassed enough wealth to retire without a worry and decide what kind of life they’d want at 30.
These entrepreneurs defy the statistics; the research that states only the top quartile of entrepreneurs make more wages than their corporate-employed counterparts and that 75% of business owners would be better off financially with a good old regular job. Still, it is not the ability to make enormous sums of money that I marvel at, but the ages at which they begin. These entrepreneurs are very young and they raise a whole set of questions with regard to when is a good time to start a business.
I started my marketing communications firms at age 29, and I will tell you if I knew back then the necessities for forming a start-up, I may not have taken my leap of faith. I didn’t have a network. Certainly no real business experience and no wealth of any kind to bootstrap my business. The only thing I had was optimism and the ability to live like a minimalist, even before the term became fashionable.
- Effective freelancers don’t ever become irrelevant or invisible.
- Effective freelancers make themselves the go to person for their services and expertise. They are forever in the know and work hard at networking, marketing themselves and others.
- Effective freelancers are nimble. Like ballet dancers they live on their toes. They adapt to changing opportunities, they can shift gears quickly, evaluate different prospects and they welcome virtual water-cooler chats about their own needs but others as well. They always want to help.
- Effective freelancers know when it's time to pull an all-nighter and when they can take the weekday or two off to catch up with the friends or the laundry. They get to choose.
- Effective freelancers don't put their careers on cruise control. They seldom abide by the rules of bosses and companies and whether quietly or not, they prefer stand out rather than to fit in
