On Entrepreneurship, or the Art of paying attention.
There is an idea that is common among people that you need to have an extensive business plan in order to run a successful business. You must have a lot of start up money, that is capital to get your business off the ground. It is considered normal to run in the red until through perseverance and grit that you finally get to a good place in your business. Although, a solid business plan and capital is definitely a wise thing to do and have, it isn’t fundamental to start a business. For this contradictory standpoint, I will provide personal anecdotes and then expand to general terms.
I am the type of person to keep tabs on world events. Perhaps, this understanding of events may be superficial, yet it gives me a fundamental advantage of perspective over someone who does not care. The events unfolding in China in late 2019 and early 2020 rang alarm bells in my mind. I knew that it would be important to make further consideration of how to secure more income because of lock downs in China that I had seen. In this line of thinking, I committed to selling items online.
In the past, I had experimented from time to time, over the years with selling this and that here and there, but nothing was ever too serious. I did notice how one could make a good return if they had bought something at a low enough price and then sold at a higher price. It was simple supply and demand. When February, 2020 had emerged and things had not improved in Asia, I determined to sit down and think about what to do to make more money. This action was very good in hindsight because just as March and then April had rolled around, my hours at work had been cut dramatically. For many people with a similar situation, they did not see this coming; however, with this more worldly perspective, I got to work selling online seriously. During the first month, I used some of my savings to buy some merchandise and to get rid of some items that were just laying around the place. I managed to sell a few hundred dollars worth in the first few months and was happy to have this money coming in. By June, I had expanded this action of buying and selling in the 500-600 dollar range and continued. Financial stress continued in my main employment, so that situation had not improved much, yet I wasn’t tied to filling deadlines like others out of sheer desperation for a bailout. By the end of 2020, I had increased selling to amounts in the thousands of dollars range. Was this some sort of remarkable sense of business? No, it was not.
Entrepreneurship in my opinion is the ability to see opportunity and to go for it. Paying attention to the events unfolding and potential consequences of events, doesn't have to be a negative task, but rather a challenge for something to change. The worldwide lock downs caused many people to be stuck at home, and because of the high standard of living in 1st world nations, people still had access to the internet, and their desire for stuff just increased. The internet still has a lot of opportunity as a sort of digital wild west and there is money on the table for those who are willing to work for it. Compare this to the capital needed to run a physical location, the comparison to the start up costs online is next to nothing.
The example of reselling takes one to see where you can procure items at a fair cost and then finding the markets, this case online and then bringing merchandise there. For some, their pride doesn’t allow them to lower themselves into making lower gains or returns, but it is this kind of attitude that would sink them if there had an inheritance or access to capital. Making a mistake will 500 dollars is much more manageable than sinking 50k into a failed venture. This may seem like common sense, but with the amount of physical business that fail each year, it begs the question of what is the logic of buying before you try.
Trying out different ideas and tactics is very similar to the Scientific method. There, it is common to try and retry different hypothesis and steps in order to get a reproducible conclusion. If the hypothesis holds up, then it becomes a theory. We then use these theories in order to build a lot of technology that people take for granite, yet if it wasn’t for this experimentation, we would be a lot further back in the scheme of things. Due to this, I propose that when it comes to business, use the entrepreneur mindset to get started.
In conclusion, learning to pay attention to the world around us gives us daily valuable information. By exploring different markets and supplies, it allows us to try before we financially buy and this can save a lot of people, time and effort that could be used to start them on a brighter future.