Wondering how to transition from employee to entrepreneur? It’s not a quick switch because you may have spent years in the mindset of an employee. This means you keep turning up and keep getting paid. Some days you get a lot done and others you sharpen your pencil a lot. If you’re making a shift to the mindset of an entrepreneur, you’ll need to start thinking differently.
It’s a little like shifting from the role of a technician, to the owner of the company. No amount of pencil sharpening is going to grow your business. No amount of turning up will bring you more customers. You must focus on the right activities to grow your business. This is a skill entirely different to those learned from the employee mindset. Even if, in principle you understand this, it’s very difficult not to fall into old behaviour patterns which used to serve you.
How To Transition From Employee To Entrepreneur
Entrepreneurs need to think about business growth. They are the dreamers and achievers. Employees have a safety net of their regular monthly income. Providing they keep their boss happy, they keep getting their monthly income. Using the same skills and attitudes to shift from employee to entrepreneur is a recipe for disaster. You may be able to transfer some of the skills you know in order to work in your business, but you also need to work on your business. And this means working on yourself.
The glass ceiling of any business is its owner. If they aren’t growing, neither is their business. One of the main skills you’ll need as an entrepreneur is marketing. If cash is the ‘life blood’ of your business, marketing is it’s heartbeat. Without a continuous stream of new clients for your business, you won’t have a business very long. This means buying customers and knowing your return on investment.
Online Marketing Strategies For Business Owners
Any business can benefit from online marketing. Direct response marketing can help small business owners grow multiple streams of customers to their business, without risking huge budgets. Starting small, anyone can learn these strategies and put them to use to grow any business.
Direct response marketing lets business owners test and measure adverts online and see what results they bring. If a marketing strategy works, you keep it and scale it up by increasing the budget. If a marketing strategy doesn’t work, you bin it and start another one.
Transition From Employee To Entrepreneur
The transition from employee to entrepreneur doesn’t happen overnight. A large part of you will resist change. You’ll want to do what feels comfortable. This can often lead to the downfall of a business if the owner doesn’t grow with their business. The owner’s mindset has a great deal to do with this. If they fall back into their previous ‘technician’ role, they will miss the bigger picture.
As an entrepreneur, you need to see the bigger picture of your business. You need to delegate technician roles to other people so you can focus on business growth. Your mindset must change to one of vision for your business, rather than working in your business. Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years? Doing the same things working in your role? Or, growing a business which gives you more time and financial freedom? Isn’t this after all the goal of being an owner?
What parts of you are holding on to the past and your previous role? What if you could let go completely of this? How much faster would you move forward and progress towards a loftier goal?
Building An Online Business From Scratch
Before I started building an online business with this company, I worked for an airport parking company writing articles and doing search engine optimisation for their website, amount other roles. When I left the role to pursue an internet business, I got ‘stuck’ in the role I had become accustomed to – writing articles. I didn’t know to focus on money producing activities and grow my business. Organic traffic being as unreliable as it is, it took me a long time to learn this lesson!
Only when I changed my actions did things start moving forwards.
Similarly, when I started building my own martial arts school, I became stuck in the role of student. I worked very hard with new students but forgot that my role had changed. I attempted to be a ‘technician’ in the role of an owner. Only when I realised this did I change my actions to focus more on nurturing my students and marketing the school. I made a lot of assumptions that my school would just grow by itself through ‘word of mouth’.
Word Of Mouth Advertising In Your Business
I learned the hard way that this was a terrible marketing strategy. Firstly you can’t control what people say and who they say it to. Secondly, you can’t measure or replicate this form of advertising with any level of success. In addition, your best customers will have a limited circle of friends who they talk to. Whether this circle meets your criteria for your potential business customers is probably very unlikely.
What assumptions do you make about growing your business? Will it happen organically over time? I wouldn’t put money on it! If you’re not actively growing your business, you can bet your competitors are! And this means they are very likely to be taking your potential customers and turning them into their loyal customers.
Multiple Streams Of Traffic To Your Website
Most entrepreneurial ventures have a website. If you don’t you should get one! After you do, you’ll need to start advertising. If you have a local business there are a couple of ways to market your website for free. Google Places and Bing Places for Business both offer this. Then you can start using direct response marketing with Google Adwords. Adwords is a search targeted platform which displays adverts when people search for a particular sequence of words. If your business is being searched for, and you’re not putting your advert up there, take a look at whether your competitors are.
This is a simple strategy to start using to bring qualified customers straight to your website. Then there’s Facebook advertising and YouTube advertising too. Learn more about online advertising techniques and marketing your own business here.
You can also download my ebooks The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing and Niche Blogging For Profit Below.
Join An Online Entrepreneurial Community
Join an online community of entrepreneurs and get the training and mindset it takes to take your business to the next level. Access a 7 day video series to learn more about this business system and online business community here.
Learn how to transition from employee to entrepreneur with online software tools and strategies to build an automated business system which can be run and scaled from anywhere globally.