How To Start The Journey Of An Entrepreneur In 5 Steps?

The 5-Step Route To Become An Entrepreneur

If you wish to become an entrepreneur, then the first thing you need to do is to contemplate where you are on your entrepreneurial journey. It will help you grow your business faster while maintaining sustainability.

After working with numerous owners, established entrepreneurs recognized specific common patterns every entrepreneur has to encounter on their journey. There are 5 key stages of this journey. As you keep growing from one stage to the other, your focusing prowess develops simultaneously. You should keep reading to find out which stage you’re in at the moment, and how you should navigate through the obstacles to take your business to the next level.

The stage your business is in can say a lot about where you should focus as the owner. By understanding the business phase, you can identify what you need to move on to the next stage. Of course, you won’t find any universal guides that can help you become successful as an entrepreneur. Nevertheless, the path to growing your business starts with understanding your current position on your journey. In doing so, you’ll be able to focus on the right things that can create the greatest impact.

1.  The Hustler: 

When you start your business for the first time, you have to be a hustler. After all, at this point, you’ll be managing every aspect of your business. Understandably, it will be a bit challenging to pinpoint your priorities. During this phase, you may feel that you’re always busy putting out the blaze and not making the necessary strides to take your business to the next level.

The challenges – Nothing will happen at this stage without your input. It will feel as if you’re too busy to cover the leaks and you still can’t identify a steady funnel for leads.

The opportunities – At this stage, you have to master your selling capabilities. You will become more productive and earn more revenue to acquire the resources required for scaling only if you align your time and goals with your revenue-related requirements.

2. The Experimenter:

In the second stage, you’ll become an experimenter. By this time, you’ll probably have a couple of employees. You’ll also have enough time to focus on the core tasks of your business while continuing your efforts as the lead sales rep. At the same time, you’ll have to navigate your new leadership expectations.

The challenges – By entering the second phase, you’ll prove to yourself that you don’t consider your business as a hobby or leisure activity. However, it’s also the stage where you have to identify everything that your audience expects from you while ascertaining and holding the tension to your quality control standards.

The opportunities – This phase is perfect for taking a few calculated risks. You should try to take every opportunity that comes your way as you figure out the way your business scales. You should also build your team with entrepreneurial generalists that will be comfortable in donning multiple hats.

3. The Visionary:

You become a visionary when you grow your business organically. It also opens up enough space to let you start working on the things required to run your business smoothly. At this phase, you’ll start delegating the task of sales to an employee of your organization. Conversely, you have to turn your attention to hire talented people to work with you for your organization.

The challenges – This stage may feel significantly uncomfortable, especially because you’ll be giving up control of specific tasks. If you have your hands in every aspect of your business, you’ll end up preventing your team from doing its job. In effect, you will become the person who creates unnecessary bottlenecks.

The opportunities – Your leadership capabilities and interactive abilities to attract the most talented job seekers will help you succeed in this stage. You must invest in yourself and the people to help you lead the company you created from scratch.

4. The Systemizer:

As the systemizer, you’ll start building a leadership team at this stage. This team will enable you to peel off specific layers from certain areas of the business. You have to keep growing your team, but you’ll also need to place guardrails to support the continuous scaling.

The challenges – Once you get a taste of success, you’ll want to repeat it. However, you’ll experience difficulties in providing the same product or experience if you don’t have turnkey systems.

The opportunities – You have to develop your managers and turn them into leaders. While navigating the interim roles within the organization to provide support to the build-out of the leadership team, you have to develop the systems with the leaders you recently assigned.

5. The Influencer:

At this stage, you’ll have the right people, product/service, and systems in place. An influencer in entrepreneurship is someone who accomplished a lot. However, influencers also have to deal with new challenges. You’ll run into much more significant growth opportunities via external expansion strategies as you continue to manage risks and threats.

The challenges – You have to keep the right people in your company as it will be mandatory to ensure continued success to your business. You have to push the limits of your employees while establishing a performance-driven culture.

The opportunities – You’ll be at the frontline leading to the goals and destination. At the same time, you’ll let your leadership team create the path. You shouldn’t hesitate to give your trusted leadership team the freedom to guide your employees and business to success.

Final words

Nobody comes into this world as an entrepreneur. You have to seek out your path and traverse it to achieve success. As already mentioned earlier, there aren’t any instructions you can follow, either. You have to take up the roles described above, and they tend to change in specific ways depending on the field you choose to penetrate. Nevertheless, there will be similarities to help you contemplate where you stand at the moment. So, which business stage are you in right now?