4 Reasons Why Working For Someone Else Won't Get You Rich !

A lot of people have big dreams of running their own business and being their own boss, especially in this economy where small businesses are flourishing. Do you have an idea for a business, store, or service you’d like to start? I’ve had many ideas, but something always keeps me from acting on them. Usually, it’s initial capital. I always feel like I need to bide my time working at my current job, saving up as much as I can, then try to launch my own business once I have my savings built up.

This seems like a practical approach, right? So why am I still not working for myself? Because I’m not taking risks. To get rich, I have to be my own boss. And to be my own boss, I have to take a risk, put myself out there, and make my money work for me.

Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to start a software company. He was in school, learning technology without a definite study or career plan, until his friend wanted to open a business with him. So Bill became a partner in a company; then… well, you know the rest. You know what happened because he became one of the richest, most successful people in the world, all because he took a risk. He left one of the best universities in the world to start a business, and look how that paid off!

So here are 4 reasons why working for someone else won't make you rich ...

1. You become too comfortable to take risks.

My main problem is that I have a job, which means I have income. I can pay my bills. I have a little left at the end of each month to put into savings. It’s comfortable! I don’t need to change anything. Which means I haven’t. You have to push yourself to make a change in a comfortable lifestyle. If I lost my job, I’d have no choice but to kick-start my dream in order to have a job and income! So do something to shake up your life, and see how one change can push you to take charge and change everything.

2. You’re building someone else’s assets.

When you’re working for someone else, you’re helping them. This is well and good if you believe in the cause and just want to get by in life; but if you want to get rich, you’re only hurting yourself. You’re spending at least forty hours a week focusing on someone else. What about you, and what you want to do? Imagine if you have 40 free hours to work on something for yourself. It’s a lot of time, right? Once you get out of your comfortable career rut, you’ll have those forty hours to dedicate to yourself and your own assets. Everything you put into yourself and your business will come right back to you. The money you spend for the business can be deducted from your taxes, and any income is yours alone!

3. Time is more valuable than money.

Money is something you can save, something you can get more of (if you know how). But time is fleeting. You’ll never be able to make up time you’ve already spent. And, as we just mentioned, when you spend time working for someone else, you’re not able to use that for yourself. Sure, you’re making money while you work, but what if you finish your duties before lunch? You’re wasting the other hours of the day doing nothing, just to get that paycheck. Or, if you’re on salary, you might be working way more than forty hours, and not getting paid what you’re worth. The company you work for is in charge of your time. They dictate your schedule, they tell you when you can leave early or have to stay late, and they tell you if you can take vacation time. When you work for yourself, you might have to work harder, but you’re working for yourself, in charge of your own time.

4. You grow too focused on saving for a rainy day.

Saving is smart. We’ve all learned that, and it makes sense. But saving money isn’t helping you make money. Skipping Starbucks and making coffee at home might save you 5 bucks, but did it earn you 5 bucks? If it did, I want your coffee maker! You’re making a fixed income, and just putting money aside. Invest your money in your business, instead! Or if you’re not ready yet, invest in the stock market to watch your money grow.

Yes, it’s hard to get something started, but you have to take the chance! And maybe it won’t take off immediately, but that doesn’t mean you’re a failure. Be patient, let your business find its footing and and follow through on things that will help you grow. Don’t expect everything to happen all at once, and don’t get discouraged — you can do it!

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/money/4-reasons-why-working-for-someone-else-wont-get-you-rich.html

How Jessica Alba Proved Her Doubters Wrong ...

Even movie stars have to stare down skeptics when they're launching a company and seeking funding. Here's how Jessica Alba persevered--and wound up with a company valued at nearly $1 billion.

When actress Jessica Alba first conceived her idea to launch a line of nontoxic household and baby products in 2008, skeptics tried to push her toward the same tried and true starlet formula: "Why not just be the face of a new perfume?" A few years later, she has a pretty good answer. The Honest Company is expected to pull in more than $150 million in revenue in 2014, has a reported $1 billion valuation, and is poised to go public. Take that, Hollywood.

Jessica says ... I founded The Honest Company on this idea: Everything that touches you and your family--everything in your home--needs to be nontoxic, needs to be effective and beautiful to look at, and needs to be affordable. I really wanted it to have an e-commerce model. What are the things that all parents need? Diapers and wipes, for sure. And then a mix of cleaning and personal care products. Wouldn't it be great if you could pick five things and get them delivered through a monthly subscription?

Everyone I approached was skeptical. There wasn't one person who said, "Yeah, that can happen." I heard "Just do one thing really well and then you can expand" a lot. But I wanted this to be a whole lifestyle brand. Everyone I talked with in Hollywood could not wrap their heads around the idea. Whenever I tried to sit down with them about it, they would just get this glazed look on their faces. Entertainment is a totally different business. It's like, how do you squeeze the most out of a person for five seconds, and then you move on to the next one. It's hard for people to take anyone seriously who's never done this before. They see you only as something else. But all that just gave me fire to move forward.

I approached this guy who built the top-selling accessories brand at Macy's. We're friends, and he was trying to help me figure out how to execute on this idea. But he built his brand off of one item and then expanded. He found traditional retail partners and then opened his own stores. He didn't understand how to build this thing from scratch. Friends want to help you, but they're also going to be the most critical. We launched with 17 products. Even my husband, Cash, thought the idea was too big.

It took me three years to find my business partners. You have to be brutally honest with yourself and understand your strengths and weaknesses. I'm not a business person--I'm a mom. I wasn't going to be coding. I wasn't going to be in the lab mixing potions. (Though I do test all the products on my kids!) I wasn't going to be the one doing the business model and running the operation. If I went in there and said, "Hey, I'm going to put together this business from scratch all by myself," I'm sure it would have been a lot more difficult to get VCs to take me seriously, but once you have the right partners, it isn't. Having the right partners also means having people you like. They're all people I wouldn't mind getting stuck with at an airport for five hours. We can hang and have a beer and chat it up, or stay silent together and be totally cool with that. That's really important.

Then the team sat down with a lot of people who weren't going to invest--friends like Tory Burch and Narciso Rodriguez, both of whom built successful businesses, and people from big tech companies and public companies--to test our pitch. They asked us great questions: What are you going to do when you run out of product? What if it's not delivered on time? How are you going to get people to your website? 

With them, it didn't matter that we weren't perfect in the way we pitched Honest. It was kind of like how comedians go out and do stand up in small clubs in different cities to test their material before they do their HBO special: All of that back-and-forth helped us refine our pitch. And it got a lot shorter--we got it down to a 10-minute pitch deck and a 15-minute question-and-answer session. So then we knew we could do it in a 30-minute meeting.

Almost every VC we talked to was on their first or second child and told me their wives were doing the same research that I was, trying to find a brand they could trust. We didn't try to find investors with young families. It just happened. But in retrospect, that would have been a good tactic!

By the time we got into the room with VCs, it wasn't that hard of a sell. We went in with a real plan of attack, a strong process, and smart people. By that point we had talked to so many people, having them try to poke holes in the idea. Because that is exactly what the VCs are going to do. Inevitably, they're going to ask questions you can't answer. If you're writing down the 20th question to which you don't have an answer, that's a problem. You can say "I'll get back to you," but not more than five times.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201411/lindsay-blakely/how-jessica-alba-proved-her-doubters-were-wrong.html

You Might Be an Entrepreneur If You Meet These 3 Conditions ...

Article by Steve Vanderveen - 

After four years of operating a small startup incubator at a private liberal arts college I've learned a lot about creating business models that work and who might become a successful entrepreneur. It’s not about having access to capital or area of study. Rather, it’s about having the right skills, the right process and the right heart.

1. The right skills.

Marketing innovation. As Michael Ellsberg wrote in The Education of Millionaires, the prerequisite to selling is listening. It's important to understand people and their needs, build networks and relationships and create unique solutions to pitch effectively.

Managing risk. Entrepreneurs aren’t risk takers as much as they're risk minimizers. One way to minimize risk is to bootstrap: Provide the resources for a startup with customer revenues. Another way is to follow the advice of Eric Ries, pioneer of the lean startup movement, proponent of the “build-measure-learn” mantra.

Test all business model assumptions, ranging from the notion of the customer problem to the hypothosized revenue stream. Startup expert Ash Maurya wrote in Running Lean that the job of entrepreneurs is to find a business model that works before running out of money.

Leading oneself and others. Entrepreneurs keep going when others stop trying. They overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. They build tribes. They transcend the status quo, form new relationships and patterns of behavior and bring change where it's sometimes unwanted.

Having experienced the process, entrepreneurs quickly adapt and confidently try new things. And things don’t always go as planned. Entrepreneurs, like leaders in the “fundamental state,”  a term coined by Robert Quinn in Building the Bridge As You Walk Across It, have the “adaptive confidence,” “detached interdependence” and “grounded vision” to figure things out.

2. The right process.

Entrepreneurship is a discipline. Peter Drucker, sometimes called the "inventor of management," argued that entrepreneurship is a management discipline. It’s a process that can be learned and applied.  

Discipline implies a process. Entrepreneur and educator, Steve Blank, outlined the customer development process in The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which was validated and further refined by Maurya and Ries for their own startups (Spark59 and IMVU, respectively). The process begins with customer discovery or understanding problems from consumers' perspective and testing whether the entrepreneur’s solution fits. 

Then there's customer validation or determining how, when and where customers (the market) and the entrepreneur’s solution (the product) meet and value can be exchanged. And customer creation entails discovering how to entice the next wave of customers to move en masse toward the sales channel. Then and only then should resources be spent to build a company to support the business model.

That last step is called company creation. Before I became a lean startup convert, I used to ask students to do the company creation step first. They wrote long business plans outlining the structure of their company before any of them knew or had tested if they had a business model that worked. How wrong I was. And how much student time and resources I wasted!

3. The right heart.

Love of the game. It takes much trial and error to find a business model that works. If a businessperson doesn’t love the process, he’ll lose energy not only before running out of money but also before it's even the right time to ask for money. 

Commitment. So what determines if entrepreneurs keep going? Love, like skill, involves both nature and nurture. It entails affection, passion and discipline. It requires both the heart and head. As is the case in a marriage, a commitment to putting others first is needed for getting through the tough times. The entrepreneur should find ways to complement others' skills and invite them to complement hers. Entrepreneurship is one of the ultimate team sports. 

Skills, process and heart can be learned. They also flow from some natural endowments.

The most difficult challenge in operating an incubator at the college level is giving students enough time to discover and develop the skills, process and heart to become successful entrepreneurs. And if they do, the next challenge is giving them the opportunity to prove that they deserve additional support to find a business model that works.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237312

Kelly Hoppen's Six Steps To Starting Your Own Business ...

Kelly Hoppen MBE, entrepreneur and Prince's Trust Ambassador, shares her top tips for starting a business ...

How To Become An Entrepreneur - The Very First Steps

Being an entrepreneur is a mindset. To become one of them, you need just one thing – to think like an entrepreneur.  

But to achieve that, first you need a plan and then you need to be consistent. 

You have to start thinking differently. 

You should not avoid problems, you should face them; you should not listen to people who say you will fail, you need to believe in your success. You will have to take risks, instead of avoiding them.  

These and many other states of mind are what make entrepreneurs different from ordinary people. 

So where to start?  

This infographic, created by startup consulting company FoundersandFounders, suggests that the first thing you need to change is your behaviour, if you want to become an entrepreneur ...

http://businessideaslab.com/how-to-become-entrepreneur/