Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2011; the reference to “recently” seeing Steve Jobs’s case concerns his medical leave announced that month. Jobs died in October 2011, so the present tense about his professionalism has aged.
Business plan, market strategy, choosing a business, managing people, keeping good, clear accounts… These are some of the absolutely essential things you have to do when you decide to start a business, and in fact they’re what you’ll learn, either over time or at business school.
But there are other factors that affect your business’s chances of success, and you’re never really prepared for them until you have to face them yourself.
What I’m about to describe are possible problems that are never mentioned in courses for entrepreneurs, let alone at a business school. Only someone who has already lived through them can teach you about them.
Let me tell you: these are the kind of problems that, even after you’ve been warned, you’ll think you can overcome when the time comes. You won’t pay much attention to them until one day they’re right in front of you. At that moment you’ll feel disoriented, confused and mentally drained, because nobody ever prepared you for it; they trained you like a machine that follows a specific algorithm. But remember that businesses today aren’t run by machines, and entrepreneurs are people who suffer from certain ailments.
1. Loneliness
If you start a business, one of two things can happen.
When your business isn’t successful: once you’re more or less under way, it may turn out that you never quite manage to turn your business around and you need help of some kind. It’s when people need help that they realize how alone they are, because as a rule people are there for the good times and very few stay for the bad. At that point you’ll feel like the captain of a ship who has to reach port alone on a high, rough sea. Everyone else has abandoned ship, taking every last lifebuoy with them. You’re alone.
When your business is successful: in this case, it’s all champagne bubbles. Everyone wants to be part of your project. It’s the ship sailing across a calm ocean in full sunshine. Not only will you have a full crew, but other ships will join you to keep you company and make sure nothing bad happens to you on that calm sea.
At that point, realize that you’re experiencing one of the worst kinds of loneliness: being surrounded by people who only stay by your side out of self-interest, because deep down you know that when the trouble starts, they’ll disappear. You’re still alone.
Never forget this:
An entrepreneur’s success is tied to the quality of the people they surround themselves with.
2. Love
We’re human, and humans tend to do a lot of things for love. In fact, great businesses have been built on the good ideas someone had thanks to being in high spirits. Love has played a part in many entrepreneurial success stories.
Love creates businesses, and love is a great destroyer of businesses.
Love can become a distraction that nobody ever prepares us for, and the truth is you can’t be prepared for something that affects you unconsciously. During your business life you’ll go through bad patches in your love life, which will show in your mood and can weaken your ability to make sound decisions.
In other cases, we marry for love and, two years later, when things aren’t working, we have no choice but to divorce. A divorce takes time, money and mental stability and, most importantly, love can walk away with 50% of what you’ve created. Amancio Ortega (the founder of Inditex, Zara’s parent company) knows something about that.
3. Work-life balance
The more successful you are, the more time you’ll devote to your business. There will come a point when your life consists of 10 hours a day on the phone and 4 hours of meetings with employees, customers, suppliers and so on.
Many of today’s business owners struggle to balance their family life with their working life. And there comes a moment, when your head feels like it’s about to explode, when you have to be everywhere at once (and obviously you can’t), when you can’t attend a family event because of work, that doubts creep in: have you taken the right path, or are you selling yourself to money and neglecting other priorities in life?
This is probably one of the situations you’ll have to face at some point in your life. And I’ll say it again: the more successful you are, the less time you’ll be able to give your family.
4. The solution
Every problem has a solution, and these three problems have one too, though, as usual, it gets little attention in those training courses for entrepreneurs. As we discussed in another article, a successful businessperson is never alone. The solution to each and every one of these problems is a “second-in-command“: a right-hand person, a protégé, a successor.
You need to find someone you trust, who doesn’t necessarily have to think like you in every respect. This person should share your business philosophy but have a mindset that complements yours and, of course, the hardest part… be able to run your business in your absence.
Over the course of your working life you’ll go through illnesses, business trips, falling in love and situations in which you’re running at 25%, so you need a second person who can take the helm when the time comes.
You have to make this person known: introduce them, train them and turn them into someone highly competent, so that everyone knows that even when you’re away, that person will run the company just as well.
Recently we saw the case of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, when his illness relapsed. It showed up at Apple as losses: everyone knows how professional and committed Steve Jobs is, and very few people trusted his second-in-command, so the company’s shares tumbled for several weeks.
If you manage to prepare this second person, nobody can spare you your personal problems, but at least your company won’t suffer from them.
Further reading
- How to be a successful businessperson
- The mindset of an entrepreneur: Donald Trump
- Common mistakes Spanish-speaking business owners make
- The secret of business success: it depends on you
- If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived
Featured image: Maciej Lewandowski from Dundee, Scotland, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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