The concept of entrepreneurship has quickly gripped the heart of many young people and truthfully there seems to be no slowdown in this. Irrespective of why you may choose to start your business, the fact that you even thought of taking the risk (financial, mental and emotional risk) in itself should be a source of great inspiration if not to anyone but to the entrepreneur.
Many entrepreneurs will normally fail at their first attempt, but sadly even more will fail at their second, third and even fourth attempts at doing business. But this is not what you see on social media and honestly enough, in these days of self-gratification, fly houses and cars etc, why would anyone want to share their many failures?
So, if entrepreneurship is NOT all the things I mentioned at least at the beginning then why be an entrepreneur? Is life not hard enough? This is a question that had plagued my mind for the last few days, and this was the question I asked on Twitter and Facebook. Across these two posts, (especially on Facebook), many responded with the buzz words; being your own boss, Independence, ability to freely innovate etc. While these are surface truths, the brutal reality is often far from the context.
As you continue to scale as an entrepreneur, you will quickly realise that the concept of being your own “boss” can disappear right under you; this is particularly true as you introduce new people like board members, investors, partners etc. The concept and illusion of independence also fall a victim to the many things that disappear almost immediately as you grow. And as economic hardship befalls the world, so also does the illusion of owning your time, getting rich quickly etc go away.
Going back to the question, with everything highlighted, then why be an entrepreneur? I mean honestly. Well to be sincere only one person can sincerely answer a question like this truthfully and that person is the entrepreneur. But in my experience (over a decade in entrepreneurship) one fundamental thing that I hope would help you have a more realistic answer to this question by having you ask yourself, if not you then who?
While your product/service may not be entirely unique, if you are not building a solution or servicing a need in your “target market” then who would? Our personal motivation to being an entrepreneur especially as Africa approaches the next phase of its Economic development cycle, our reasonings on why we choose to be entrepreneurs or venture into such a painstaking journey has to be more realistic than the superficial ideologies of “being your own boss”, “being Independent” etc.
As a result, the simple answer I had been looking for to my question is; if not you then who? this would open the question to the size of the problem, your capacity to solve it and the future of your solution; this is the future of what it means to build a business with the understanding that whatsoever you think is cool about entrepreneurship may just be a fairy tale.