Why are we entrepreneurs?

Why do we do it? Being an entrepreneur can be a deeply rewarding experience. We revel in the triumph, big or small, that comes after hours of practice, years of struggle and devotion to a craft. If you have experienced the feeling of hitting a baseball cleanly, you know there is nothing like it. It feels as if you didn’t even hit a ball. Your body feels drugged. The satisfaction that comes from fighting for your dream. It is the ballerina who spends countless hours on the plié, relevé, and sauté until her feet bleed and then nails her routine in a ballet performance in front of a packed house. The golfer who goes to the driving range, hits thousands of balls, and then bribes the owner to let him keep hitting balls until 2 a.m. He plays round after round and struggles with his game. Then comes the shot. The clean drive. Or the wedge to within ten feet.

Have You Experienced That Feeling?

The same is true for the entrepreneur. There are few feelings like building something from nothing. All the hard work seems worthwhile when our vision comes to life. Most of us will never forget our first logo, office and investment. Our first customer. The first day we made a profit. When we served that first piece of pizza. When someone wore our jewelry. The first press we got—it might have been a mention in the St. Lance Gazette with a circulation of 1,000, but it still felt great. Once we become the entrepreneur, there is a transformation that subsumes all that we do. It doesn’t matter whether you are designing jewelry, building a new app, starting a catering business, opening a restaurant, or creating a healthcare company. You might be an innovator in the new sharing economy with a business on Uber, Etsy, Airbnb, or TaskRabbit. Whatever you’re doing—if you’re an entrepreneur—it is an obsession.

Being an Entrepreneur is an Obsession

If you’ve never been an entrepreneur, here’s what you might not understand: being an entrepreneur is not just a job. It is an identity. Entrepreneurism is like oxygen. It’s not optional. Once you have an idea, you need it to breathe. Once you have that vision, it’s a drug that seethes through your blood every day. We say things to ourselves like, “What was I doing with my life before I came across this?” It may seem melodramatic, but not to those with a vision. There is nothing like it. And once you’ve experienced it, there’s no going back.

Sounds pretty good, right? But entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. You’re heading into uncharted territory, probably without a map, or the right tools and enough supplies. There will be many days as an entrepreneur when you question what you are doing. Days when you don’t know what you are doing. Those days when you know what you are doing but are not sure why. And days when you are not proud of yourself. Days when success seems so near. And days when success seems out of reach. Life would be fine, or at least manageable, if you were simply making a business decision. But it is much more than that. As entrepreneurs, we take this stuff personally. We question our purpose, our character, our will, our motivations, our capabilities, and our ability to bring our visions to life. The happiest day can also be the loneliest one. This is the nature of the beast. It’s a complex animal all of us entrepreneurs have to face.

An Entrepreneur Knows What It Feels Like

My guess is that if you’ve become an entrepreneur, you are experiencing at least one of the following feelings: Carrying the world on your shoulders. And you don’t have the money or resources you need. You feel like no one understands what you are going through. Your relationships are strained. Friends, family and co-workers think you are crazy, stupid or selfish. And you find yourself in a crowded room but feel alone. You are exhausted but you can’t sleep. Or maybe you are hungry but you can’t eat. You are home but feel lost. Standing in the shower under freezing cold water for five minutes seems easier than running your venture. Sound familiar? I’ve been there. It’s one thing to create solutions to business problems. It’s quite another to create them when you feel the world is on your shoulders. When that happens, we feel like we are sprinting through cement even when we have talent and great business ideas.

It’s How We Manage The Struggle

All of the conflicting feelings that come with the territory are at the heart of the big question facing all of us: will we make it? How we cope with “the struggle” has as much, if not more, impact on our fate as the business decisions we make. Though I didn’t know it at the time, The Lonely Entrepreneur was born in the middle of my own struggle—actually— in the middle a struggle that can only be described as the “perfect storm.”

After a decade of blood, sweat and tears, we closed our first big outside investment on October 15, 2008—nearly ten years to the day from when we opened the doors. We should have been celebrating our recent successes and a big new investment. The financial crisis of 2008 was already brew- ing and hit us like an enormous, crushing wave. Among other catastrophes, it bankrupted our biggest clients and severed relationships that had taken years to build. Our business? A decade of work virtually gone in ten days. We were on the brink of disaster. I didn’t know if the business was going to survive, but for it to have a chance, I knew it would take two years of twenty-hour days to dig ourselves out. Imagine that—two years to save what it took ten years to build—and there was no guarantee we’d make it.

Weathering the storm, as you’ll see, was a serious fight—one I almost lost. The stakes were high: I wasn’t just fighting to save the business. I was fighting to save my employees, my clients, my investors, my family, my deteriorating relationship with my brother, and myself—though I would have gladly sacrificed myself if it would have saved everyone else.

It’s Our Perspective and the Skills We Develop

I needed solutions immediately, desperately. Yet in the eye of this perfect storm, I realized quickly that the normal solutions were not going to work. It was no longer a decision to take “this road” or “that road”—there weren’t any roads left. The roads and bridges had been annihilated by the financial crisis. All familiar routes were gone. There was no shortage of tools—business plans, financing strategies, advisors and the like. But in the eye of this storm, these familiar strategies failed. The solution was not another business plan or spreadsheet. What I needed most was not a “tool” but rather something more fundamental.

It’s not about passion or grit. I had plenty of that. But the world crashing around us hardly cared how much of those things we had. When we started our business nearly a decade earlier, passion and grit (and a good idea) was all you needed. But at this time – and even today – passion and grit is what you need just to get on the ride.

In the midst of this perfect story we needed solutions. And i realized that success was about developing a whole series of specific skills. How do you communicate more clearly? How do you make your sales message resonate better? How do you stretch dollars? How do you get the most of your people? How do you lead in the middle of the struggle. These are just a few of the skills that we had to develop to be successful.

Applying the Skills We Develop In the Struggle

As I applied this to our perfect storm, I discovered, repeatedly, that our ability to apply these skills in the struggle was the difference between thriving in this struggle—and barely surviving it. The ability to address the many business and personal issues we face as entrepreneurs with these skills can make all the difference. Without the right skills, even the simplest of tasks seem impossible. But with the right skills, solutions come to life for even the toughest of challenges. Same resources. Same obstacles. Different results.

Understanding this was an epiphany that would fundamentally change how I saw my business and ran my company—from employees to clients, financial strategy to communication. It would also lead to the successful sale of IncentOne, establish my company as the pioneer of the health rewards movement, and inspire me to create The Lonely Entrepreneur.

I wanted other entrepreneurs to understand, and take heart from knowing, that the realizations I made about perspective during this time offered me, not just a way out of the trenches, but the power and freedom to do more than survive. I discovered that there were ways of “seeing” that led to better “doing” and the possibility of actually thriving—even when storm clouds are threatening.

We hope that this perspective of what is an entrepreneur, will help you start developing the skills to be and do better each day!