Entrepreneurial Motivation—Moving From “May As Well” To “Now Is The Time”

A decade ago, when the economy crashed and unemployment remained high, there were many stories about making lemonade out of lemons. If you were unemployed, you were already in a risky situation, so many hypothesized that the startup risks were somewhat mitigated. There was a lot of press about harnessing the unknowns and getting out of the unemployment rolls by becoming a business owner. In one day, with an LLC filing, you could change your narrative and self-image from that of “unemployed” to that of “self-employed.”

That was the story behind my own first entrepreneurial venture in 2001. A New York Times opinion piece from 2000 talked about the infamous Dot.Com Bubble Burst and what it did to reset people’s thinking. The impact of an imploding stock market further progressed into an all-out economic crash in 2001 as every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Sally who was going to get rich off the internet and “new tech” hit bottom. According to the New York Times, “What recent months suggest, however, is that it [the internet]may not be an indiscriminate, magical new means of making money.”

At that time, I worked for an ad agency that closed abruptly, offering me a 2-week warning after 8 years of toil and ascent. I had valuable skills, no college degree, no immediate employment options, and like nearly everyone on earth I had no savings. Add to that the fact that I didn’t want to “work for somebody else,” and it created the perfect conditions for entrepreneurship. Or so I thought.

Although I wasn’t directly in the tech business in 2001, I was in the marketing of, by and for technology companies. Before I could even get my new, beautifully conceived business off the ground, my technology clients started shutting their doors, those that kept them open stopped doing marketing and I learned the unpleasant truth of “failing to time your launch with the right market conditions.”

Fortunately for me, I also learned how easy it was to get re-employed, continue building skills and market concepts, and wait to better time my entry into the market. That is precisely what I thought I was doing in 2007 when I launched my second agency. The market was booming, I had a successful career, I had plenty of options and I chose entrepreneurship this time out from a “now is the time” mentality instead of a “may as well” start a business mindset.

Within a year, my company was in the black, approaching $1Million in first-year revenue and, wouldn’t you know it, the unthinkable happened. Again. In September of 2008, the market crashed hard. The Balance does a great piece on the intricacies of the 2008 bubble if you weren’t in it.

But this time around, my company didn’t fold. I pushed through. For one thing, the market dynamics of this bubble were symptoms of a bubble less directly tied to me. If I had been marketing to financial services firms in 2008, the fate of my second business may have been the same as the fate of my first.

But the most important distinction, at least in my mind, is the difference in mental attitude I had in 2007 and 2008, and the very way in which I launched my second business. The first time I started a business, I decided I could sell the skills I offered as an employee, to a group of clients in the form of a business. The second time I started a business, I had a vision for what was missing in the market for a much broader group of prospects. I diversified nearly every aspect of what we did, how we charged, who we served, how we served and this diversity enabled our business to ride out the storm in continuous pursuit of an evolving vision.

The market crashed again in February of 2018, but it wasn’t even on our radar at the time. We weren’t suffering from what Dr. Norman Vincent Peale referred to as a “condition of lack.”

If you’ve never listened to Peale’s “Positive Thinkers Always Get A Positive Result,” I highly recommend it. I’m sure you’re listening to the latest podcast, and I think adding some content from the days of old, like those that study history well, will do you a world of good.

As you move through the phases of employment, unemployment, entrepreneurship, re-employment and so on, build in yourself a “condition that actualizes.” It is the core of successful entrepreneurship. It operates in many ways independent of market conditions. It enables you to keep evaluating what’s ahead and where you fit into, instead of evaluating the now and what you just did.

And that’s really important because people (the media, data wonks, and all the -anti-Trumpers) have been saying another crash is just around the corner. Markets are cyclical, and people sure do seem to like to write about “lack.” Not this past Friday when the markets again hit all-time highs, but it will come again, and entrepreneurs will need to be ready again to flex.

Or, you can always become re-employed—where you can either read about lack or work on your condition of actualizing.

Source: Forbes.com

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