7 Dark Truths About Being An Entrepreneur

When you contemplate taking the plunge and becoming an entrepreneur, Typically the first few weeks and months of your journey, the reality of being your own boss and building your own enterprise is exhilarating. The stories about overnight successes and other business leaders finally hitting that pinnacle in their work and thinking that you’ll experience the same.

These positive and exciting aspects of entrepreneurship are certainly true and make it worthwhile, but you have to remember there’s also a dark side to entrepreneurship. The thing is it's not cute so nobody talks about it. So here's something different for a change, the truth. It isn’t all fun and games, and those “overnight successes” are the by-product of exhausting behind-the-scenes work and years of sacrifice and failure.

Before develop unrealistic expectations about being an entrepreneur, check expectations with these seven dark truths:

1. You won’t make money quickly away.

Raising capital is a backbreaking task, and usually serves as a financial reality check to hopeful young entrepreneurs who fall prey to get a rich sales pitch. The truth is, as for most businesses, the first several years of operation building up your infrastructure and making it run smoothly. You’ll spend more than you’ll make in revenue, and as a result, there is a really good chance you won't receive a paycheck for several months. You’ll have to rely on your savings or reserves for basic living expenses and hope things pan out in the future.

2. Your personal life will suffer.

It doesn't matter how optimistically you charge into the role or our level of commitment to prioritizing your personal relationships, they will suffer as you continue building your business. The long hours, sometimes at home, and you’ll always be available for resolving business problems all the time, weekends and holidays. You’ll be distracted constantly, thinking about everything your business is facing, and the financial stress you’ll take on will invariably take its toll on your relationships.

3. Juggling everything will take its toll on you.

Being the CEO of your own business, you’ll wear many different hats. You’ll get to do the work you love to do, but you’ll also have to do the work you hate to do. an admin, a manager, an IT technician, an HR manager, while also being a marketer all at the same time. It doesn't matter how excited you are to take on these responsibilities, this constant gear shifting will inevitably wear you down.

4. Your emotions will get the best of you.

There will be times where your emotions will very well get the better of you, even if you try to suppress them or find a cathartic outlet for them. At this point, you're too invested in your own enterprise for this not to happen. You will inevitably feel depressed and discouraged about where you are at, or the biggest one the fearful that you won’t make a profit in time. When your emotions get the best of you, you’ll feel terrible and you’ll make worse decisions.

5. Nothing goes the way you want or think it will.

Your business strategy might map out every step you envision for the first few years of operations, but no matter how much research you’ve done, you won’t be able to predict or prepare for everything. Even the things you predicted won’t happen how you envisioned. As an entrepreneur, you’ll be forced to adapt, sometimes in ways, that you hate to.

6. You’ll be forced to make decisions that will haunt you.

As an entrepreneur, the primary decision-maker for your company is you and it requires that you make hard, stressful decisions during your tenure. Some of those decisions will stay with you as if it's branded on your conscience even if you make the logically correct one. You’ll have to change direction almost constantly You’ll have to part ways with partners. You’ll have to sacrifice part of yourself for the company. You’ll have to terminate people.

These decisions are never easy; they have to be made, and they will haunt you.

7. You will fail.

Your entire company might go under. It's happened to me eight times. If it doesn’t, there will be some other failure, whether it's massive or minor, that will interrupt your plans and compromise your vision. Failure is an inevitable, and necessary, part of entrepreneurship, even now eight years later it's still hard for me to accept. The obstacle of failure is constantly present and always following you when you’re leading a business, and getting through that failure is too much for some. However, the ability to recover from failure is what separates the successful from the rest.

My goal isn't to talk you out of becoming an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is and should be, an exciting and extremely rewarding endeavor for anyone who chooses it. I want to deliver a different perspective that prepares a new generation of self-starters for the realities of entrepreneurship so they can better understand the obstacles ahead of them and realistically prepare for the journey.