You have to start somewhere, we all do.

As soon as people get one job on a side or a side hustle they all think of themself as an Entrepreneur. It’s actually not like that.

To become one you have to go thru different steeps:

Professional

Self-employed

Business owner

Entrepreneur

*Definition of a professional
-Professional engaged in a specified activity as one’s main paid occupation rather than as an amateur.

So for example, a doctor.

The doctor is a professional in healing people. When he is not there, nobody heals people. He mostly works fixed hours and goes home.

He does what he is told and his job is usually done after 8 hours shift. I believe that  90% of the working population fits this category.

What is crazy to me is that the same doctor then levels above “average doctor” let’s say his department manager, then above him, let’s say principle have the SAME EDUCATION, SAME TRAINING bu they just operate on a different level.

*Definition of self-employed
A self-employed individual does not work for a specific employer who pays them a consistent salary or wage. Self-employed individuals, or independent contractors, earn income by contracting with a trade or business directly.

People say that they want to be an entrepreneur but I believe that more than 90% are actually want to be self-employed and determine their own life.

What I mean by that.

They want to have like 4 hours of work in a day during the week and spend more time with the kids and do more things they like, and that is fine, but that is not being an entrepreneur.
You want to be self-employed and not an entrepreneur.

For example, a graphic designer is self-employed. He does all the work, and he is the value.

So when people say I’m starting my own business they mean they want to be self-employed

*Definition of the business owner
Individual or entity who owns a business entity in an attempt to profit from the successful operations of the company.

Generally has decision making abilities and the first right to profit. As a self-employed businessman, you are doing all the work.

As a business owner, you have people that do the work you used to do.

So let’s say that you are in the HR business and you started your own recruiting company.

Now as a business owner you will employ people to manage people you used to manage and do the work you used to do yourself as self-employe.

*Definition of the entrepreneur
A person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.

Best meaning of what being an entrepreneur is

If you can walk away from your business and be gone for more then 3 months and your business is still active, you are an entrepreneur!

I believe that sentence speaks volumes.

It is very challenging if you skip any of these steps.

The transition should come naturally and there is no way to shortcut it.

If the two of us both took a potato and put it in the ground and I water my potato once a day and you water your potato twice a day you will not have better results.

Because the laws of nature are fixed.

An even better example, everybody has to go thru puberty, its not like something you can skip. You have to go thru it.

Even if you skip a step you will realize when some issues arrived that you should not skip it because you would have a deal with that problem at an earlier stage.

It is important that you know every aspect of your business so that way your employees and government can’t mess with you.

For example.

If you write your own sales process and you see that the process works, and you have tested it and reach clients and closed deals with it, it is hard for salespeople to say that they can not sell!

Yes, they can, because you wrote it and tested it and because of that sales process now you have employees working for you, so the process sells and nobody can prove you wrong.

It gets harder and opens a lot of room or gray area if you don’t know your business that well and anybody can tell you anything and you would just have to believe them.

Which phase are you currently in?

Darko Bilandžić
get further, faster!