I can tell you that from the outside looking in, being a business owner is awesome. Great hours for the owner, they come and go as they please, so much money, etc. Right? If you think thats the case you should come spend a week with me and see what it takes to juggle multiple businesses. The truth is that owning a business is the hardest thing I've ever done. Owning more than one business as you can imagine just makes things a little more complicated. Now I'm not saying you shouldn't want to own a business or have that as a goal because you should. You should do whatever you WANT to do and I encourage you to pursue that with everything inside you.
Being an Entrepreneur is a battle to fix something that occurred the day before or follow up on something that got overlooked last week. Everyday is fight. Let's be honest, we are humans and mistakes happen. At the end of the day when everyone goes home the business mindset doesn't stop or turn off. Or at least it shouldn't. You have to stay busy keeping up with social media, planning the week out, making sure the workers and business associates and partners are happy because lets face it, the workforce is not plentiful for some trades and my industry is no exception so losing a quality employee can hurt.
Next thing you must be careful of is what I call the "Tribe Factor." This might not effect everyone but the "Tribe Factor" is a reference to family time. You MUST spend quality time with your tribe. It is so important on so many levels and if you work too much (which we are all guilty of) you will lose precious time that can never be gotten back. So you have to slow everything down and enjoy it.
Another struggle of being an entrepreneur is not only keeping all those you work with happy but keeping your customers happy as well. In this day and age, word of mouth works differently than it did ten or fifteen years ago. A bad business encounter in 2002 with a client might result in 10 or 15 people hearing about it. In today's digital age, everyone knows about the bad issues within minutes of the encounter. Let's face it, a bad review can be detrimental to business. While most clients are very quick to post, comment, report, review, or all of the above when a situation goes wrong, you don't always collect positive reviews so the negative can be impactful.
So to my point, while it all looks good from the outside...everyday is a struggle. Everyday there is a new problem or problems to solve. While you may find your business running well and in a highly efficient manner, there is a likely going to be a time where chaos occurs again. Whether that regression takes place during a period of growth or because of another business decision, the probability is high that this will happen.
I love doing what I do and I will never complain it because this is what I wanted. I see a focus on Entrepreneurs in today's mainstream and it looks so good...even to me. I love a positive environment but at the same time, I am a realist and I think it is so important to see that it's not easy. There are failures that occur daily and I can't tell you if I even learned the right lesson today. Being a business owner can be the best and worst thing you do so if it's truly the path you want to take, get ready!