people.” I don’t mean aging; I mean pallid, pasty, near dead looking. Every morning they march off to a job they have no interest in doing well and derive nothing from but an unsatisfactory paycheck. Every night they come home bored and boring. The price they pay is huge, but it is a slow, almost invisible dying. If you look close, though, you can see it in their eyes.
Yes, entrepreneurial life exacts a high price. Often in ways everyone around you dislikes intensely. As chief cook and bottle washer, you’ve got nobody to call in sick to. While the employee leaves at 5:00 whether work is done or not, you can’t; if there’s a deadline looming, you must meet it, even if that means skipping dinner, your kids’ school recital, sleep.
In one interview, the daughter of Dave Thomas, founder and developer of the Wendy’s fast food chain, was asked if her father came to her school events. She said she doubted if he even knew where her school was! Yes, the entrepreneur’s family pays a price too.
However, I know plenty of fathers who are physically home every night and every weekend but mentally and emotionally elsewhere. Or who are constantly concocting excuses to get away from their families. Like golf, a game that clearly would never have been invented if marriage hadn’t been invented first.
The reality is this: you don’t get to choose a life without a price. There are options, but each has a different price.
There are two sides to the price of entrepreneurship. As an example, consider illness or death in the family. My father was ill in his later years, and there was some real risk he might be suddenly rushed to the hospital and die without much warning. I knew, if I was en-route to a speaking engagement or in a distant city honoring a speaking commitment, that I would not “stiff” the seminar promoter; I would honor my contractual commitment and my father would wait. That never happened. When the time came that he was rushed to the hospital, I was able to drop what I was doing, buy a ticket without blinking, and fly across country for a good, lengthy final visit. I also supported him financially, entirely, for over ten years.
The person in a “normal” job gets family leave. The entrepreneur does not. The employee has one boss, the entrepreneur many. In many ways, it is easier for the employee to do the things in family life generally regarded by most people as correct and appropriate, but it is quite often the “odd man out” entrepreneur in the family that everyone else turns to, to get out his checkbook and pay the bills the others can’t. His willingness to pay the price for entrepreneurial success is what makes it possible for him to pay the tab in family crisis or tragedy. When financial crisis arises in the family, nobody calls the poor relative.
The upshot of this is, you the entrepreneur must be prepared for, and be rather thick-skinned toward, the criticism of the nonentrepreneurs in your life about the price they perceive you pay for your success.
The Decision of Autonomy
When you depend on others, you collect and store up excuses for failure like Harry does. Harry doesn’t like his too-small, indisrepair house. He doesn’t like his five-year-old, mechanically ailing car. He doesn’t like the pile of bills in the kitchen drawer. He hates his job. He doesn’t respect his boss. But wait, the one thing he does have going for him is a book of excuses. He opens it up and sighs with relief: This sorry state of affairs isn’t my fault. My mother liked my brother more and that gave me an inferiority complex. We grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. My family couldn’t afford to send me to college.... And on and on and on.
This is called burying yourself in B.S. If you really want to be a success in business, you need to be emotionally independent before you can ever become financially independent.
To succeed as an entrepreneur, you must set aside your neediness for acceptance from others. Immunity to criticism is a “secret” shared by all the highly successful entrepreneurs that I know.
To succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to set aside your “Book of Excuses” once and for all. Making money as an entrepreneur and making excuses are mutually exclusive, wholly incompatible.
I feel fortunate to have discovered a lot about this very early in life.
If I ever got an allowance, it stopped when I was still a little kid. I don’t remember it. I do remember earning my spending money very early on. I picked strawberries and packaged tomatoes at the greenhouses behind our community, cleaned stalls at a nearby stable, and washed and waxed cars. I soon figured out that selling was easier than manual labor. So I spent my teen years selling. I sold business printing and advertising specialties, Stuart McGuire shoes, a new plasticized, reusable carbon paper, and became involved in a multi-level marketing company.
In my early experiences in direct and multi-level sales, I quickly found out that most of my distributors (even though they were 5 to 25 years older and more “mature” than I was) could not be relied on even to have the appropriate literature, samples, and other materials with them at presentations! If I wanted prospects handled properly, I had to take steps to make up for the others’ lack of organization, discipline, and reliability; I had to have extra supplies on hand. This business taught me the importance of self-reliance, and the futility of relying on others.
The sooner you arrive at accepting 100% responsibility for everything, the more successful you’ll be. Go take a look in the mirror. There’s the man or woman—the only man or woman—who can make you happy, thin, rich, famous, or whatever it is that you aspire to. Dr. Phil can’t make you thin, McDonalds doesn’t make you fat.
The power you need and can have as an entrepreneur comes from eschewing all excuses. Never blaming the economy, the government, the competition, the timing, your parents, your school, or anything or anyone else for anything. Ultimate power comes from accepting total responsibility. When you believe as I do that circumstances control other people but not me, then circumstances won’t control you either.
A very common occurrence in America in recent years has been Wal-Mart coming into a town, and lots of little mom-n-pop businesses rolling over and dying. Their owners blame Wal-Mart. There have been protest marches. Books written. Much hand wringing about behemoth Wal-Mart destroying small businesses left and right. All utter and total B.S. And here’s the proof: there are small businesses who have thrived when Wal-Mart came to their towns. Why? Because they didn’t embrace the excuse for failure. They re-engineered their businesses to do what the giant won’t, to compete in a different way.
Bill Glazer, President of Glazer-Kennedy Insider’s Circle™, is a case in point. In his former life, he was a retailer. When he began, in downtown Baltimore there were 14 competing menswear stores, each independently owned. As giant national chains entered the market, 13 of those stores closed. The last store standing, one of two thriving stores owned by Bill, ably withstood heavy, direct competition from the giant discounter, Mens Wearhouse. In fact, his stores enjoyed double-digit annual growth while his industry went flat, and his stores consistently generated per square foot profits 250% higher than the industry average. How could this be?
For one thing, Bill is an ingenious, aggressive marketer, who violated his industry norms, made extensive use of direct-mail, and overall developed such unique and effective marketing he was able to package it and sell it to thousands of other retailers for their use. Another, he is extremely disciplined, so he insisted on his salespeople performing; booking appointments by phone with customers rather than standing around waiting and hoping for somebody to walk in. But possibly of greater significance is his attitude about competition, his conviction that he can always reposition his own business and out-maneuver the big behemoths or anyone else. He approached his business from the standpoint of someone totally and
