Picture this—you’ve just begun the process of building your company. You might see yourself walking through the doors of a big office with your name on the door, meeting with clients and industry movers and shakers over fancy restaurant dinners, jetting across the world to close your next business deal, and giving a TED Talk about the secret to your success. Those are all great goals to work toward, but that is far from the whole picture of being a founder. Take it from someone who’s been there, the reality of building a business from the ground up is a whole lot less glamorous.
Starting an organization often means spending long hours doing tedious, painstaking, and frankly boring tasks. The day-to-day of running a business—especially in the early days—is usually more along the lines of reaching out to a huge number of potential clients, conducting industry research, vetting vendors and partners, creating organizational processes and documents, sorting through stacks of resumes for your first hire, and even taking out the office trash throughout the day. Bringing your company to life isn’t always champagne and fireworks, and it definitely isn’t easy. It takes long hours, hard work, and a deep passion in order to make your dream a reality.
While getting a new company off the ground is often a slog of unglamourous, monotonous tasks, that doesn't mean your hard work won't pay off in the end—just the opposite. Those very actions are what determines whether your business succeeds or fails. So let’s take off the rose-colored glasses for a moment and talk about what succeeding as an entrepreneur actually looks like so you can begin your journey with open eyes.
It’s not always going to be pretty, so manage your expectations now.
Look, I’ve lived the quintessential, oft-romanticized founder story. It was the early 90s, I was a young woman in my 20s just starting my career in NYC when I up and quit my miserable office job—where I faced sexism so cliche you’d think it came out of an episode of Mad Men. I was hungry, I had a vision, and I was ready to start my own business (fueled by little more than a dream and a whole lot of ambition). We started in a postage stamp-sized NYU dorm room and grew into a billion-dollar global powerhouse with offices in over 100 cities across the world.
On paper, it sounds like a story made for TV, but the reality was far less picture-perfect. Think never-ending, soul-crushing paper jams, cockroaches taking up residence in the coffee maker, ramen noodles for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, cold calling prospective clients while our dying printer screams in the background and my “assistant” Molly yaks up a hairball (yes, Molly was my cat), and being so broke I was scrounging coins from the trash bin (all things that actually happened).
Don’t get me wrong, starting a business is a thrilling rush—you’re out on your own, fighting to survive, and trying to make something out of nothing to bring your dream to life—it’s incredibly rewarding and there’s nothing quite like it. But the vast majority of your days are grueling, often mind-numbingly dull, and even depressingly grim at times, especially in the early days. I say all this not to dissuade you from starting your entrepreneurial journey, but to make sure you’re ready for the challenges that lie ahead when you do.
Actions are everything.
I cannot tell you how many times people ask me what the most important thing to succeeding as a founder is, as if it could ever be just one thing. That said, my answer is always the same: actions.
Actions are everything when it comes to launching a business from the ground up. It may sound obvious, but building a business requires actually doing the work it takes to build a business. The work it takes to transform an idea in your head to a real, profitable, living business will likely be the most challenging part of your entrepreneurial journey. Dreams are wonderful things—and you need them to keep you going—but without actions, they’ll only ever be dreams.
In the early days of my company, I worked hundred-hour weeks. I spent my days making hundreds of cold calls a day, conducting extensive market research, tediously cataloging data in spreadsheets, and personally signing so many pitch letters that I was certain my hand would be forever stuck looking like a claw. The hours were long and hard, I forwent vacations, holidays, and nights out, and I had to reward myself with such luxuries as a lukewarm cup of coffee or a few minutes of outdoor air just to keep going. That’s what it took for us to succeed.
Hang onto your passion—you’re going to need it.
However difficult those early days were, if given the chance to go back in time and choose another path, I’d do it all over again. What made all of those long hours and late nights worth it was the dream I was working toward. This is why it’s so important to create a business based on passion. Without passion, it’s near impossible to survive the challenges and demands of building a business from the ground up. Passion is what fuels those late night sprints, it’s what gives you the drive you need to keep picking up the phone and making calls, to continue sending pitch letter after pitch letter and email after email no matter how many rejections you get. It’s the spark that keeps you going day in and day out, no matter how hard things get or how bleak things feel. Your passion is your lifeline, so hang onto it and never let go.
The opportunity to chase down your passion, to build something out of nothing, and to make your dreams a reality is what makes being an entrepreneur such a profoundly rewarding journey unlike anything else. It may not be easy, but few things worth doing ever are.
WRITTEN BY
Liz Elting