The Entrepreneur Trap is something that I expect almost all entrepreneurs and business owners have or will go through at some point in their professional careers, per business they operate.
I’ve gone through it myself, several times, and while each time gets easier, it’s still a painful process until you learn to plan better (pain, money, energy, and time being the cost of earning your business experience/maturity stripes).
What is the Entrepreneur Trap?
Let me describe the typical entrepreneur. He could be a coach or consultant, or in this example, he could be a small distributor or retail store. Let’s call him Albert (Al for short). Al has an idea to start a business teaching others how to sell women’s shoes, so he gets a website (effectively putting up his shingle), writes about what he does and starts looking for clients.
Soon he has a few bites here and there and does some coaching. He’s excited, his idea works and he wants to grow it.
As he tries to grow, however, he finds that:
A) He is faced with learning a number of new skills, from marketing, to prospecting, to selling, which means taking time to do so and
B) His available time concurrently decreases as he also has to go deeper into what he’s already doing.
Eventually, the combination of the two becomes too much. He wants to generate more revenue, but at this point, there are so many unfinished tasks that he needs to do (or redo, as they were rushed and weren’t done well the first time) that he can barely eek out a living to sustain his business as it is. He is forced to work in his business and sell his sales coaching services and does not have the capacity (mental, temporal, nor financial) to go to the next level.
Now, what is more interesting, and relevant to you, is what is going on for Al, the person. When he first started his business, it was a very simple, singularly focused task – get people to pay for sales coaching to sell women’s shoes. There is ample bandwidth in his mind to promote what he is doing and get a few customers. His mind is free to wander into the creative right brain and he starts dreaming of getting rich from this business.
As he starts learning new skills and doing more activities to grow his business, he is no longer focused on one thing, he’s multitasking. And the more he learns, the more he wants to do and add to his increasingly heavy workload. Now, his mental bandwidth is completely full and he starts forgetting things, running out of time, trying to do a million things at once…and his sales and revenue are dropping fast because he hasn’t had time to promote and sell.
The increased workload and the decreasing (perhaps even negative) cashflow at this point is STRESS, STRESS, STRESS on his mind. Eventually this stress builds up and he’s either not eating or emotionally eating. Al is tired, moody and depressed and he burns out every once in a while. He’ll take some time to recover, but then throw himself back into the mix, only to burn himself out again. And again, and again.
This, my friends, is the Entrepreneur Trap. While it seems so easy to diagnose and get out of, from the outside (more about that in a future post), many entrepreneurs can tell you from personal experience that when you’re in it, you can’t tell what’s happening, it just seems like you’ve plateau’d with no way out.
What’s even more ironic is that most new entrepreneurs, or Vancouverites (haaa), will flash a fake smile and tell people that things are good and nothing is wrong, all the while the pain and dissatisfaction eating them up inside
Don’t let this be you. Join the newsletter and you’ll get an update about the Symptoms of the Entrepreneur Trap and a post about how to get out of it.
Note: “Entrepreneur Trap” term created by Ronald Lee.
Best,
Ronald Lee
www.elevatedmarketing.ca
604-781-7093 info@elevatedmarketing.ca
…follow us on twitter! http://twitter.com/ElevatedMarket
{ 1 trackback }