The Timid Entrepreneur

Understanding Your Battles and How to Overcome Them

WRITTEN BY DON M. MCNULTY ©2024 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

On an open forum, a young small businessperson who had lost his two largest customers was commiserating about whether he should continue with this four-year-old business or give up and return to the corporate world. Every time he saw a job he could apply for, it didn’t excite him, and his alternative to keeping the business didn’t seem to excite him either. The following is my answer, and I realize I am using assumptions that may or may not be relevant. 

I will be blunt because I've experienced what you're going through: burnout. Is it correct that your business consists of you alone? If so, you weren't building a business but a job. In this type of job, you're in just as much of a rat race as in corporate jobs. 

Why is it we work? My answer is to provide an excellent living for myself and my family and to build wealth. You can do the same with a job, but the wealth part usually takes longer. 

Business gets complicated when you must fight cash flow or have all your eggs in one or two baskets. You stated you lost your two largest accounts. First, could you consider why you lost your two most significant accounts? 

Did you make too many mistakes? Were you not timely in preparing the customer's statements or tardy on filings for the customer? Generally, if a person loses two big customers close together, there is a reason for that happening.

Next, you should build a business that will set you free and give you life. If your business isn't providing life, you need to do better or get a job and quit whining. The first order of business is to make sure you're financially sound. To do this, you may need to take an accounting job until you figure out what you want to do.

You might be in what Michael Gerber called the e-myth. The entrepreneurial myth is that I'm an accountant, so I opened an accounting business, or I'm a mechanic so, I can open a mechanic shop. The question isn't, can I do the work; the driving question is, do I know how to run a business that does that work?

These are two very different skill sets; I assume you’re missing one.

If you thought a corporate job would make you sick, dig in and start producing. As I see it, you have two options: when you produce more than you can handle and still do the marketing and sales to build your business.

Option one is to sub out the accounting to other freelancers whom you will oversee for quality and continuity.

Option two is to hire someone to do the marketing and sales and hire employees to help with the load.

While doing all this, you must simultaneously learn what it takes to run a business that builds you a life worth having and the wealth it can bring if done correctly.

If it were me, I'd pick option one. I already know how to do the accounting and option one would give me more time to learn how to build my business.

I love being an entrepreneur. Nothing else drives you to self-introspection, to learn who you are at the core, to learn what you want from life and to own it, to know it. What brings you the greatest joy? What is it that limits you?

If what thousands of others and I have learned in that truth — you are, what limits you?

Do you have goals? They are wishes unless they are written down with a plan attached.

Who knows? Option one could become your newly revised business model.

Most entrepreneurs develop an eye and a drive to pursue opportunities. Most people don't see those opportunities lying at their feet as though they were dust.

My advice has always been to start from where you are and build from what you know now. As you move forward, what you need will be given to you by a suggestion from a friend, a mentor will offer help, and a book that can guide you a way down the path will be revealed. A spark from within you that gives you the work-around to a problem.

I can guarantee that at one point, and this may be it, it will appear as though the path is ending. If you push through, you'll see that the path takes a sharp bend and goes on before you.

There's so much I want to share with you, but you've created a decision time. Now you'll have to decide.

My very best to you and yours.