Lessons I’ve Learned From Being My Own Boss
Lesson one: It’s not easy.
Duh.
Over the past months I’ve been transitioning from working as an Intrapreneur for one of Americas “100 Best Companies to Work For.” to working for myself. It’s been an exciting, eye-opening last couple of months so I’m thrilled to share with you a few of the lessons that I’ve learned through my employment transition.
This post was inspired by a conversation I had with someone this morning, he told me “that’s the beauty of working for yourself, having your own hours.” Which I agree — it’s fantastic to be able to set my own hours. But just because I have the freedom to do what I like, doesn’t mean that I get to invest my time unwisely.
Lesson two: You’re the boss & the employee.
Being your own boss is fantastic if you have the discipline to think critically about the most important aspects of your business and then assign yourself the work that must be done in a fashion where you (the boss) expect’s you (the employee) to get everything done quickly, efficiently and doing a phenomenal job.
As your own boss you have no one looking over your shoulder making sure that you aren’t browsing Product Hunt or binge watching your new series on Netflix all day. You alone are responsible for the progress that you make everyday.
Holding yourself accountable for work that you commit to doing is accelerated by joining a mastermind group that meets every week to discuss your weekly goals, progress, roadblocks, etc. My mastermind group has given me advice, honest feedback and helped keep me on track to reaching my business goals each week.
The last thing that I want to happen is show up to my weekly mastermind meeting saying that I didn’t reach my goals because I got too caught up in catching up on all 20 episodes of the latest season of Gotham.
Lesson three: Focus on specific goals
The first few weeks of not working a corporate job were the toughest. I had all the freedom in the world to work on all of the ideas I had racing through my head over the last few years. I worked a little bit on a lot of things which was exciting at first but after a few weeks I started feeling depressed and couldn’t figure out why.
One day after leaving the coffee shop feeling exhausted it slapped in across the face… I was working on too many things and wasn’t making any measurable progress forward. I had to answer the tough question of…
There are so many things that I can do but what should I do?
It took me a couple of days to sort through the pieces of ideas I had been working on to narrow it down to two decisions. After measuring both ideas against the viability, chance of success, level of effort involved — I made a decision to focus all of my energy on one business.
It’s been four weeks and I’ve made considerable progress in my business because I’ve set clear goals to focus on each week and hustled my butt off to make sure I reach them.
Lesson four: Rethinking Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Most people that have worked with me know that I have been a huge opponent of MVP’s — I look at them differently now but I still have a strong opinion of them.
They are excellent in framing your thinking to get your product into the wild in the shortest amount of time possible to test your assumptions with real people. The issue that I have with the mentality surrounding MVP is that too often I see them being used an excuses to skip important steps and creating a half thought, poorly crafted (crappy) product that no one will like — no matter how good your idea might be.
In my previous employment we had the curse of having an unlimited budget which led to insanely long development times, poor work ethic and lacking a sense of urgency.
Working for myself I have a finite amount of capital in my bank account so I have the sense of urgency that pushes me to focus on making wise decisions and creating the best work, the first time around as I can.
In practice this means that my website wasn’t anywhere near perfect when Sunday rolled around — the day that I committed to shipping my website. I had to use Google Forms as my contact form, cut corners on certain things but I couldn’t afford to wait. If I waited for perfection, that meant more days that potential customers wouldn’t be able to see my services.
So I shipped my imperfect website and I continue to work on it to incrementally improve it over time. The key is that I got it out into the world for people to see.
P.S. I typed this and didn’t proof read anything so if there are mistakes— enjoy the beauty of the imperfection.
Have an awesome day — get out there, and work on your dreams to bring them into a reality.
