The reason why most of us feel uncomfortable with entrepreneurship is because we don’t like roller coaster rides. It's the fall that we are terrified of.

Clients love your work, you go from  meeting  to meetings. You’re exhausted but happy.  But there are times when the phone remains silent or the  HR issues become exhausting.  Whatever the manifestations, your nerves begin to rattle.  

Somehow you thought  you had  built the next Google  but inside you’ve got to admit to yourself,  and then to those that love you, that your idea wasn’t so hot shot after all.  That it will take time to find its traction in the market.

Maybe that’s the toughest part in building a new business, the realization that others (customers)   don’t see your dream as big as you do. 

What should you do? There are two roads.

Persist or quit.

Either is a viable option. 

Quiting allows you to reassess,  re strategise. And yes, even start afresh. There are tons of leaders  of great businesses who  floundered along the way. 

If you decide to persist…

Cheers.

Caution.

Because the energy that you will need to  keep  your start-up going, in lieu of unbridled success,  isn't free; its back breaking work.

Still it may be  worth it for I do believe this: Entrepreneurship is for those who can handle the ride and  for the those who  understand that the curves of the roller coaster are  simply just part of the journey. 

1. Effective freelancers don’t ever become irrelevant or invisible.
2. 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. 
3. 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.
4.  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.
5. 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

Nothing the slightest bit amazing has ever been done in isolation. 

This is the era of mingle mania. In a pared down society you are only as strong as the people you know. You may well be the smartest person in the world but if no one is aware of you, it does not make a difference.

Individual competitiveness = what you know x who you know. 

Overnight, each and everyone of us could set up a mutlinational company in our bedroom and using the Internet, we can reach a market of  millions of  people. 

Focus, focus, focus and then focus again means that we all need to find partners. We need to find parters to help us with each and every activity and process where we are not world-class. A lot of folks are used to outsourcing parts of their private life - cleaning, daycare etc. Not it is time to start farming out some of our professionals lives.

This is particularly true of small firms. I call it survival when things are tough. Growth when things are better. Whatever the times, partnership power means we get to  witness some really dynamic clusters of expertise and knowledge in our firms and we remain relevant, in good times and bad.

How are you partnering?

Yesterday,  I understood the frustration of our PR team. It was the third time we were submitting the same RFP to the same client. The third time we worked back breaking hours on  weekend in as many weeks. The third time the psychological and creative investment was being made.

“I am not sure we should go for it,” our designer said, who was frustrated at the client’s mix up. 

I understood the sentiment. Exhaustion. Frustration. Disillusion.

But as the  leader of the firm  my role is to take the jar of hope from its shelf, open it  and sprinkle required doses around the room. My strategy is not hocus pocus, more precisely it’s about assessing the situation and  taking calculated risks.

Running a PR firm that wins 40 % of new business by responding  to RFPs is like playing the lottery. 

I figure, if we participate, if we respond to the Requests, there is a 99% chance we’ll lose. On the other hand, if we do not take part, our chances at losing are 100%. 

To succeed I have kept  my eyes on the single percent. 

Getting back to yesterday though as we rallied under enormous pressure (technology glitches, mix ups with the  printer and our courier) we sent off our proposal on the wings of hope and prayer and yes, some  kick butt creatives.

As Jan Michelle ( Mango Media Caribbean’s  AE)  stood in the lobby of the client   waiting for Judy (our Event Director)  to bring in one last item to slip into our  package, I sat down to calm the nerves after 14 stressful hours of  working through problem after problem.

Do clients have any idea of the passion that goes into the work? I am not sure. But as I sat in the lobby of the client, I felt a sense of hope. And I thought  that the the future truly belongs to the outliers - those who dare to take risks, break rules and push to the edge. 

It  belongs to those who seize the opportunity to create it. 

Customers come in all shapes and sizes.

Some have fat accounts. Others barely have budgets to match their dreams.

Some can see your vision right after you're done with the last sentence of your pitch. Others will question your every idea until the cows go home. Give in, and you and your idea are screwed. Fight for the campaign that you know is a winning one, succeed, and you'll find yourself a loyalist.

After 11 years in business I have encountered and served them all. Quite happily. In over a decade I've fired 3 clients because of their energy drain. 

I figured out in year 5 after a particularly clueless client berated one of my employees without cause, that I would obsess only with delighting customers who were happy to be happy. Does that sound like tautology? It's  actually not. It has become the raison d'être for our successful PR practice.

Work with clients who are delighted to be delighted. Hire wonderful, talented  people who know how to serve them. 

Happy customers will spread the word. Happy employees will attract them. To me that's win/win

Yes, you heard me right.  To succeed we must stop being so goddam normal.

"If we behave like all the others, we will see the same things, come up with the same ideas and develop identical product and services. 

At best normal output equals normal results.

In a winner takes all situation, normal equals nothing. 

But if we are willing to take one little risk, break one tiny rule, disregard a few of the norms, there is at least a therorectical chance that we will come up with something different,  actually create  a niche and make a lttle money."

Are you ready?

Mary John will be rewarded for loyalty to her job at an award ceremony next Friday at the Hilton Hotel. For her almost two decades of service and then some, she will receive applause.  A plaque.  And a Hilton dinner befit for a queen. 

My generation would probably scoff hysterically at Mary’s notion of long service. “Five years tops at one place,” is what we tell ourselves. And organisations are lucky to get us for even that!  We’d consider Mary a relic from the past, a sort of dinosauric representation of what corporate loyalty is supposed to mean. A characteristic to be admired,  perhaps, but certainly not to be emulated.  

But there was something about Mary, the 52-year old accounting professional at an oil and gas plant on the Point Lisas Estate that had me reeling from surprise. As I interviewed her for a DVD on the company’s achievements, Mary spoke about the passion that she felt for her work and the way the company had allowed her to professionally develop. She went on and on about the freedom she enjoyed on the job coupled with the responsibilities that came with it. For Mary reporting day in and day out to a desk stashed in the corner of a windowless office was a personal odyssey toward fulfillment.

Something profound has changed between that Mary’s generation and mine: we reject blind loyalty, a slow and steady climb up the corporate ladder in return for unwavering commitment is unheard of. Additionally, retirement nirvana means going on a world cruise at forty-five, not collecting a gold plated plaque at age sixty-five.

But with all my generation’s bravado, all our talk about finding success an unexpected yearning is being expressed. And it is  clear that through all the career hopping, the job switching, the MBA leave of absences, the job restlessness, all of us are searching for the very thing that Mary found in one place: career fulfillment.

But can work ever be fulfilling, given its mandatory nature? And how do we go about defining fulfilling work? And whose responsibility is it to make it fulfilling- our bosses or ours?

These are the inescapable questions that most of us are asking when we go in and out of jobs and find a similar disconnect in all of them, like my friend, a 38-year-old management professional who possessed a dream job with equally dreamy perks and questioned his decision when she was forced to work another late night at the office with an ailing mother at home.

There are those who take a different trek to fulfillment. For the brave at heart, the entrepreneurs, fulfillment means taking risks, trying new endeavours, striking out when there seems to be no give left in the system? The risktakers  leave and form their   own companies creating opportunities as they go along.

Entrepreneurs figure that there is nothing so wrong with  the economy that prevents them  from pursuing life long dreams. And even if there is, they pursue them anyway. Entrepreneurs see tons of options, all of them involving hard  work but they console themselves by saying its something they do for themselves.

For entrepreneurs, fulfilmment is in the personal stake.

But for those that decide to stick it out in the swampy waters of the corporate world career fulfillment requires a different level of awareness.

 I remember a conversation I once had with a 55-year old mentor who gave me the best advice about finding fulfilment at work. She said it was important to understand what you wanted from life, and work hard at finding a  nexus with a chosen professional path.

“It is necessary,” she said, “because we  all return to our desks and offices day in and out so trying  to understand what it is we like best about our work while performing aspects of  the job that we like and were good at, were probably the best bets to finding fulfillment on the job.”

They were wise words, I thought,  simply because they require reflection about our purpose and the kind of work we set out to do. But more than reflection her words  demand a certain amount of proactivity in finding a definition of career fulfillment.

In the early issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) this year,  there is a terrific article on the three "levers" to good work, which can be used by young professionals in finding the same sense of satisfaction Mary had- no matter if we work in windowless offices or rooms with views of the bay.

HBR states to find fulfillment young professional should have a:

Mission: Define and articulate the mission of your particular profession and whether the institution in which you work and the colleagues with whom you work carry out work that is in accordance with this mission. 

Model: Identify models of admirable workers who exemplify the kind of worker you want to become. Learn from them

Mirror: Reflect on the decisions you make and approaches you take by asking yourself two questions: Am I proud of the kind of worker I am? What actions can I take today that will allow me to truly connect with the wok I do?

No matter how we carve it, work plays an enormous part of our life, we’re at it 8 plus hours a day, we talk abut it with our mates, we complain about in our private moments and it sometimes keeps us up at night. But it can be celebrated, and not just at the end of the month. A paycheck does not necessarily correlate with job happiness.  

Is fulfillment at work necessary? Absolutely. After all, should we not ask as much from it as it asks from us?

So your things to do list is clear. You've checked things off  your agenda line-by- line. You’ve responded to all emails. You’ve made the calls. Is there anything else?

Well no. Time to head home. Pat yourself on the back. You’ve earned  that pay check. 

For most people the idea of hinging a future on an idea that might not work is a little scary. And so it should be. Maybe.  Times are lean and  corporate  cutbacks are many.  Together, the cumulative effect engenders fear. Fear of taking a risk. Fear of failing.  Fear of the unknown.

I know that fear. It can cause you to   wake up in the morning with a litany of excuses  that stops you from carving a  reality from your dreams. 

"I will not be as smart as Bill Gates, so I give up!" Yeah, well, Bill Gates thought the Internet was not going to last and launched three database systems which all failed. 

"I'm never going to find the time, I work 12 hours a day as it is!" Uh huh. Time is precious as well  for the  9.6 million entrepreneurs surveyed in the US last year  who said their entrepreneurial ventures  were not their primary sources of income. 

There is no crystal ball. Sure you write your plan, develop a business model, roll out the budgets but really  there's no way to know for sure whether your business is going to work, whether your targeted customers will buy, whether your choice of technology is a good one, whether  your dreams will find traction with your employees. 

You're going to get things wrong. Know this up front.

In the face of this uncertainty, it seems to me that the very worst thing you can do is fail to try.  And yes, even in this economy.