How the Entrepreneurial Journey Unfolds

Entrepreneuring is a journey and if you are thinking of being an entrepreneur you will benefit from understanding and anticipating what’s ahead.

While everyone’s entrepreneurial journey is unique, all journeys share several fundamental characteristics. All journeys start when a person contemplates whether entrepreneurship could be good for them and all journeys end when that person no longer cares whether entrepreneuring could be good for them. In between think of the journey having 5 steps:

Thinking

A person thinks about whether being an entrepreneur could be good for them.

Beginning: The thought appears that entrepreneuring could be rewarding.

End: The person gets excited enough about the potential rewards that they want to dedicate time, resources and money to experimenting to see if their ideas could be as rewarding as thought OR the person decides thinking about entrepreneuring is a waste of time.

Experimenting

A person works to figure out how to turn their entrepreneurial ideas into reality.

Beginning: A person has an idea they think could yield exciting rewards and they begin to experiment on how to turn their idea into reality.

End: A person or team of people have fashioned an idea into something that some customers happily start paying for OR the person or team stops experimenting to think of a better way.

Entrepreneuring

A person or team of people start selling a product or service to paying customers.

Beginning: A first paying customer.

End: The business is closed OR the business is sold OR control of the business is agreeably or forcibly transferred to someone else.

Post-Entrepreneuring

The entrepreneur continues to work for or helps a business they founded but no longer control.

Beginning: The business is sold OR control of the business is agreeably or forcibly transferred to someone else AND the founder continues to perform duties for the new owner.

End: The founder no longer works for or helps the business they founded AND either stops thinking about entrepreneurship OR starts thinking of another entrepreneurial idea.

Not Thinking

A person thinks entrepreneurship is a bad idea and waste of time.

Beginning: When someone who had previously thought entrepreneuring might be good for them, decides it is no longer worth thinking about

End: When the person starts thinking about entrepreneurship again OR they die.

There are several things to note about the journey:

• Journeys do not always include the entrepreneuring step. Indeed, most entrepreneurial journeys end with the journeyer deciding after the thinking or experimenting steps that entrepreneuring is not a good choice for them.

• Most people do not take the steps one after another. Most people bounce around between thinking, experimenting and entrepreneuring.

• All the popular instruction sets on how to be an entrepreneur are prescriptions of how to think about and experiment being an entrepreneur. Making a business plan or business model canvas is all about how to think about being an entrepreneur. The Lean Startup is about how to speed through the experimenting steps to get to an MVP. Effectuation is about how to carefully think through a series of experiments before entrepreneuring to minimize risk and the amount of investment needed.

• None of the popular instruction sets give much advice on how to best succeed once you are entrepreneuring or why, whether or when to think about transitioning out of being an entrepreneur.

• You do not take any step if you do not want to, except if you die or if your business is forcefully taken from you.

We can coach you through all the steps of your journey, so each step is taken when and how it is best for you.