Finding the business that's right for you: Be flexible
NEW YORK -- Kelly Newsome is one diverse woman: attorney, birthing assistant, yoga instructor and consultant to non-profit organizations. Next up: launching a stationery business.
Newsome, like dozens of others this month, crammed into an entrepreneur workshop here hoping to glean ideas — and energy — from the speakers and other attendees.
She was further along than others, some of whom introduced themselves to speakers by noting that they had too many and too varied ideas, or ideas that never seemed like the right fit.
Entrepreneurial ambiguity is common, says Escape from Cubicle Nation author Pamela Slim, who co-hosted the forum with Jonathan Fields, author of Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love.
The duo counseled the budding entrepreneurs not to panic if their ideas weren't fully realized, but to instead do some soul-searching. Would-be business owners need to think beyond the types of jobs they want to do, their financial investments and their potential customer bases. They also need to consider the broader lifestyle they want, Slim says.
She asked those in the room to visualize their ideal place to live, how many hours a day they plan to toil and what type of work setting suits them. The answers were incredibly varied, from one woman who wanted to work just two to three hours a day to others who were willing to invest much more time.
Once you determine that, the next step is to pair those personal preferences with a viable business model, Slim says.
Such entrepreneur-focused workshops, as well as programs such as the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation's FastTrac classes, can help folks further hone those plans. The Kauffman Foundation is a foundation devoted to entrepreneurship.
There is also a multitude of resources that offer one-on-one help, such as the entrepreneur-training organization Score and the Small Business Development Centers that are dotted across the country.
Those looking for less formal — but just as valuable — education can learn from the school of life.
Last summer, Charlotte Bowen quit her technology-focused job at New York City's Columbia University and traveled to Moscow. Her plan was to earn some money teaching English and eventually start an IT consulting firm there.
Once overseas, however, she realized that the technology in Russia wasn't nearly as far along as she had thought. She was told that it would take three months just to get Internet access to her home. So, after five trying months of dealing with a huge language barrier and incredibly cold weather, she returned to the States and worked on reformulating her plan.
She got a full-time job doing technology work for a hedge fund and also took on some smaller IT clients.
Her last day at the hedge fund is Friday, and on Monday she'll officially launch her U.S.-based consulting firm, InspirIT.
The takeaway from her time in Russia: not to launch a venture without thinking it through and doing more research. "I completely learned my lesson in biting off more than I could chew," she says.
Setbacks like the ones Bowen experienced are an expected part of the entrepreneurial path, says Slim, who began her own consulting firm in 1996, four months after she left a training manager job at Barclays Global Investors.
She advises potential business owners to think of business creation as a scientific experiment. If the initial steps don't work out, look at it as testing a hypothesis, then make some tweaks.
Some folks may miss the corporate environment — and the predictable paycheck — and ditch entrepreneurial life, she says. Others may discover that with some adjustments, being a make-up artist, dog trainer, yoga instructor or a U.S.-based IT consultant is their ideal vocation.
"The whole idea of success and failure is spectacularly unhelpful