Executive Transition to Entrepreneur

You have heard that it’s important to work on your business before you work in your business. In planning your transition from corporate to entrepreneurship, conventional wisdom states that your Business Plan is the place to begin.

Here’s my personal opinion: I’ve done it this way, and in my humbled experience this is not the place to begin. It will slow you down and it will put a glass ceiling on your success.

Working on your business – there is no perfect plan! You can waste years trying to figure out the perfect business plan – a plan that will help you raise enough capital to absorb any shock from mistakes. Coming from a corporate environment you can probably relate to this bailout mentality.

Warning! You will get caught up in your Plan. After all, this is the accepted form of doing business – identify your target, make a plan, fund your plan, stick to the plan, measure against the plan, and either adjust your actions to close in on the target or adjust the plan.

You’ll be wrong! A perfect plan today, will not be a perfect plan tomorrow. There is no perfect plan, so don’t waste your time. The Plan will, at best, give you only incremental success. Incremental success is where you’re coming from. Change in large organizations is often painfully slow. Haven’t you been trapped in short-term growth and performance targets?

A plan will keep you trapped in the same ‘working’ conditions that are the antithesis of the entrepreneurial dream. The constant drive to meet a predefined plan keeps you in frenetic activity and leaves little time for introspection.

What will give you extraordinary success? Long term vision and a mission! Your PAG – Your Passionate Audacious Goal will give you direction to extraordinary success; an exponential leap in business success and in your lifestyle.

• Start with your Passionate Audacious Goal.
• Find your PAG’s directional true north.
• Start now! Take your first step, an action fueled by inspiration. Have fun.
• Each step will inspire you to the next step. Check each step for directional alignment.
• Live your life in inspired action, every step moving you closer and in a straighter line towards your PAG.

No-one can tell you what will succeed when you start your business. You have to follow your heart and trust your gut. When you take this route you will find opportunities that were previously invisible to you. Opportunities that would never have been discovered had you followed a plan. Opportunities far beyond the glass ceiling of any plan.

High Achievers have PAGs. Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen started out Chicken Soup for the Soul® with a big vision which they called their "2020 Vision" – by the year 2020, to sell 1 billion Chicken Soup books and to raise $500 million for charity through tithing a portion of their profits. They are well on their way with more than $1.3 billion in brand sales so far. 

So when you make the transition to entrepreneur you’re faced with a choice: You could develop your business plan and continue your old habit of constant action to meet your plan. In fact many entrepreneurs increase their level of action, and stress, hoping to increase their results. Or you could slow down to allow for inspired action.

In fact your best plan could be ‘to give up your plan’. When you operate from this perspective you become mega-productive in less time. There is a secret to speeding up your results which will launch you beyond the glass ceilings of a traditional plan.

My personal experience has demonstrated to me that when something is not working, consider the opposite: "It’s not about moving toward your goal, it’s about knowing how to move your goal toward you."

• You move toward your goal by following a PLAN.
• You move a PAG toward you by constantly checking the alignment of your tactics with your long term vision and mission.

Your growth as an entrepreneur will be organic. Each step will reveal the next step. Your path may seem to wind, but in the end it will be the straightest path between you and your PAG, and a lifestyle you would never have conceived a plan for.