The tips and tricks no one is telling you about entrepreneurship (from someone in the midst of it)
Here is what no one tells you about entrepreneurship: the timeline you were sold is not a lie, it is a lie by omission. I am almost a year into my first year in business and I am not making 10k a month. I am not making 5k months. What I am doing is coaching cheer and gymnastics Monday through Thursday, volunteering at church on Thursday mornings, traveling for competition weekends through most of the winter and spring, and building this in whatever is left over. That is the part that gets left out of the ad.
So here are four things I have actually learned. Not from the top of the mountain. From the middle of it.
What They Tell You
“It’s literally this easy.”
“You can make 10k months 3 months from now.”
“If you buy this course…”
“If you just…”
It felt like I heard things like this over and over when I first started, from all the gurus. And yes, some of these people are super successful and there is truth in what they are saying. But they are leaving really important information in the dark.
They don’t realistically speak about the process. They don’t show their path to success in a true timeline, or share all the little thoughts, feelings, and things they actually had to do to get there. There are a lot of people out there who are really good at selling systems and telling you all about the good things. Not so many who will have the tough love conversation.
Bye.
Goodbye to the days of no transparency.
There is this idea in marketing that you shouldn’t be fully open about the thick of it. That showing the messy middle costs you authority. I think the opposite is true. Taking a bit more time to truly build a business worth showing off is more valuable, and almost necessary, compared to positioning yourself as an expert when you’re not.
What You NEED to Know
Yupppp. And they won’t tell ya.
What follows is a list of things nobody wants to do. Every one of them takes a lot of time and thought to get good at, and we live in a society built on comfort and the lack of an ability to endure hard things over time.
That’s the whole secret. It isn’t a system. It’s endurance.
1. Delegation
Not everything inside your business is YOUR job.
Learning the skill of delegation is the biggest help that no one tells you about. It is much more effective to pay for the service of someone who can do the job well than to learn the skill yourself and eat the cost of the learning curve and all the trial and error that comes with it.
What it cost me
Operations and systems.
I’m a designer, not an operations specialist. I don’t want to automate emails and workflows. I want to design. But I kept telling myself I should be able to figure it out.
It cost me confidence. It cost me time and effort in an area of business that genuinely exhausts me. And it cost me months of trying to work up the umph to do it all myself, months I could have spent on clients and on refining the parts of my business I am actually passionate about.
The test I use now
The thing you dread doing.
If it takes you longer to motivate yourself to do it than it would take a professional to just get it done, and do it better than you would have, HAND. IT. OFF.
You’re wasting time in shoes that don’t fit.
2. Balance
In a world of people who care about nothing but productivity, we often forget that rest and restoration are required for you to work well. I’ve found that I am much more creative and much more stable when I am well rested and my stress is limited.
I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t think I quite have this one down yet.
I’m getting closer. But this one is hard, because it probably involves using the word “no” a lot more often than I currently do.
What rest actually looks like for me
I’ve started to develop a mental meter. If I can feel my exhaustion and burnout, it’s time for rest. And that’s okay.
Beyond that, the real, unglamorous list:
- A consistent 7 hours of sleep
- Fun things on the weekends, and staying off socials as much as I can while I’m doing them
- Not overcommitting. If I know something will limit how I’m able to show up for something I’ve already agreed to, I don’t do it
- Three nutritious meals a day
- A walk or a workout every morning to get my mind working
And the one that took the longest: being realistic with myself. I used to beat myself up for missing something, or for not getting something done fast enough. All it ever did was make my mental state worse, which made my work worse.
3. Growth = Time
Growth takes longer than anyone admits.
The timeline you get sold isn’t exactly a lie. It’s a lie by omission.
When I started, I thought it would take six months to a year to be making 5 to 10k a month. Or at the very least, to see a return on the courses I’d bought. I’m almost a year in now and that is not where I am.
Some of that is circumstance. I have another job that provides most of my income. I’m young and still figuring out adulthood in general. And I have wrestled with imposter syndrome the entire time.
Here is what my week actually looks like
I coach cheer and gymnastics Monday through Thursday, 3pm to 8pm. That job pays most of my bills. On Thursdays I’m also at church volunteering from 8:30am to 1:30pm, so by the time I get to the gym that afternoon I’ve already worked a full day.
Then there’s competition season. November through April I’m traveling weekends for both cheer and gymnastics. May and June it’s gymnastics only. Not every single weekend, but enough of them that the calendar stops feeling like it’s mine.
The business gets built in the cracks.
What I built this year that nobody can see
If you looked at my business from the outside, this year might look like not much happened. Here is what was actually being built:
- A new mindset
- Better routines and systems (thank the LORD for Atomic Habits)
- Confidence
- The foundation for a truly intentional business, from nothing
And I mean nothing. No savings. Living paycheck to paycheck the whole way.
None of that shows up in a revenue screenshot. All of it is the reason the revenue will eventually exist.
4. Find Good Friends
I know this sounds like it doesn’t belong in an article about business. It belongs here more than anything else on the list.
A friend sees you as more than just a business owner. They’ve probably seen your toughest days and your hardest trials. They’re emotionally connected to you, and they probably know you better than you know yourself at times.
A coach or a course doesn’t understand enough about you to know what pace and what timeline are realistic for your actual life. They don’t know your brain, or exactly how to motivate you and lift you up.
And best of all, a good friend is free. The best friends feel like an ROI. They pour into you.
How to tell a good one
You’ll know because they feel like an ROI. They give back. They return the love. They have something to offer, and they love deeply.
They make you a better person.
Especially for the Perfectionist
You’re actually doing great.
The expectations you have for yourself in your head are probably not realistic. I want you to sit with that for a second, because I don’t think most of us ever check whether the bar we’re failing to clear was reasonable in the first place.
Use your perfectionism to your advantage. Because of it, your motivation to do things and achieve things is already heightened. That’s not nothing. That’s fuel most people don’t have.
Give yourself grace. And try to have more fun while you do it all.
With Love, Shelbi
I write about design, business, and all things creativity once a week over at The Society. If this sounded like your life, come sit with us.
I write all about what The Society Stands for here.
