Starting a business

I was chatting with a close friend who just launched her own business recently. She’s really going through the challenges right now as the “excitement period” has subsided. When you first start out, you get to do a lot of fun things like naming the company and thinking of all the fun future ideas that you’re going to execute on.

Once that period ends, the real hard work begins like getting that first dollar in the door and dealing with all the challenges including regulatory and compliance. You get your first few bills and start to realize how much all this costs. Most times you don’t have a salary to rely on either.

The reality of starting a business is that you’re going to be heads down doing a lot of not fun things. Working with lawyers. Administrative tasks. Accounting tasks. The fun stuff like building the product is only a small part of the journey.

You also take a lot of L’s early on in the journey. You think you have something in the bag and then you get sucker punched. That happens over and over again.

The journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur is glorified often, but behind that success is a lot of mental strength. I have tons of friends who love talking about ideas and some of them are good ideas, but when push comes to shove, not many of them would be able to make it very far in the journey.