How to Move Away from the Wage Mindset

The wage mindset stopping the entrepreneurial spirit.

This post is all about the entrepreneurial spirit we have inside us and the biggest obstacle we face in trying to unleash it. I think I’m like most people, in that from an early age my parents told me study hard, get a good job, work 40 hours a week, and pick up your wage at the end of the week. What they didn’t tell me was to wash rinse and repeat this process for the next 40 years and then finally retire at 65 .

It doesn’t matter what type of new business you are planning, the one thing we all have in common is the realization that no matter how much we work there is no guarantee that we will be rewarded for our efforts.

Now there a couple of ways to combat this, the first would be to have a nice little nest egg tucked away that will keep you going until there is a steady wage coming in each week. The other, less scrupulous method would be to pouch all your existing clients and take them with you when you start out on your own, sadly though many of us will not be afforded these luxuries. If you know where to look you will find that grants are available, applying for these can be a long, tedious and painful process and there is never any guarantee that you’ll be approved but you have to try and I have found it is not necessarily a killer business plan that will win them over, it’s sheer determination and stubbornness to keep trying until they finally give in.

Back yourself to win.
Every entrepreneur takes a gamble before they start their own business. To make this gamble pay off you need to have the cards stacked in your favor, don’t walk into anything blind with the notion that things will work out, they don’t. You can know what you need to break even you can know what you need to make a profit and you can know what you need to make to pay your wages, but do you know what you need to make it work?

Let’s say you want to open a coffee shop in your local town, everybody likes coffee? It has to work right? Now this is where stacking the odds in your favor comes into play and to do that you need to have all the facts. How do you get these facts? well one of the best ways is to spy on your competition.

I never said this was going to be easy or much fun, but this is what I would do and remember it’s all about the facts. Sit yourself outside your competitors for a full day, from the minute they open to the minute they close, count the number of people that go into that shop, how long they stay for and what they are carrying when they leave. Count the number of chairs in the store, how long it takes to serve each customer, how many staff they have working, how much they charge. Write down anything that may be of use to you.

Now you have the facts you can figure out how to beat them, you know the busiest time of the day and the quietest. Let’s say that their busiest time is in the morning before work, if people are in a hurry why not make it quicker and easier for them to order, offer a phone in or text service with the guarantee of no queues. For the quietest time of the day, cut down on your staff or offer something for free to try and bring in more business. Try anything you can think of that will make you stand out from your competitors, use any tactic you can that will help to give you the edge.

Moving away from the security of a wage at the end of the week is difficult with no easy way of coming to grips with the uncertainty of knowing how you are going to pay the bills or where the next mortgage payment will come from. If you have decided to take the leap of faith please take my advice and know every fact down to the minor details, by doing this you will know before you start your first day if there is a business there or not.