Executive Transition to Entrepreneur

When you began your journey climbing the corporate ladder so many years ago – this was the ticket! You got a good education, found a good job, worked hard, probably sacrificed your personal life and your family to build your career, saved for retirement, and were counting down the years until you could actually stop working so hard and have some fun.

These were the rules and you played the game honorably. Somewhere along the line both the rules and the game changed. Now you’re feeling the pressure of an increasingly hostile corporate environment. In today’s economy companies can disappear in an instant. You can no longer trust that any job will be secure. And you’d rather become an ‘opportunity’ entrepreneur than a ‘necessity’ entrepreneur.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that you create a bullet-proof business plan, get enough investment money … Except that, in the new game, you can only have money if you don’t need it.

This may be a blessing in disguise. Having no investment money may be a huge advantage. The constraints that you are faced with will push you to make key discoveries and decisions that could change the course of your business from ordinary to extraordinary. As you become extraordinary you won’t be the one looking for investors, they’ll be looking for you.

As a successful corporate executive you have other advantages to becoming a successful entrepreneur:

• Previous accomplishments allow you to trust your instincts
• Experience reinforces your business judgement
• You’ve built organizations and created value in spite of constraints
• The net worth you’ve built eliminates short-term financial concerns
• You’ve helped build someone else’s legacy …

Now it’s time to build your own legacy!

Admittedly, a sudden dose of adversity would be a good catalyst to get your entrepreneurial juices flowing. But why wait and become a ‘necessity’ entrepreneur when you could be proactive and become an entrepreneur ‘by design’.

The biggest thing that stops executives from making the transition to entrepreneurship is fear of failure. When fear takes over it drains all the power out of the advantages you had. That’s why the most important step before you work on your business, is to work on yourself.