If you want to become an entrepreneur the good news is anyone can enter and anyone can win. The market doesn’t care if you went to a private school or if you live in the street. The market is unemotional!

To become an entrepreneur you will need:

A product or service that helps someone solve their problem – fast

A bullet-proof mindset that can withstand any challenge

Consistent amounts of active follow through

It’s not a new idea. Anyone who has ever been successful at anything throughout history, from Mother Theresa to Mohammad Ali, Stephen Hawking to Bill Gates have all used these very basic human traits to achieve greatness.

They believe, to their very core: This is what I want to do. And they do that to the very best of their ability each and every single day. No matter what.

That means that no matter your age, your skill sets, how far you went through school, how much money you have or what your IQ or EQ scores might be you can achieve incredible success as an entrepreneur. If you are tune with your internal compass that tells you who you are, and or, what your purpose is and you are willing to follow that compass to its endpoint no matter what… then you have everything you need to be an entrepreneur.

Your passion is your compass. Money follows passion.

Your idea can be anything. It can be about you, it can be about the world, it can be about how something is supposed to work. It can be about making life easier, or deeper, or more rewarding. Whatever it is, every single idea is an opportunity for you to create.

That creation might be something physical or it might be a service or system that gives other people access to something they cannot achieve on their own.

This is all it takes to become an entrepreneur, have an idea, create it, deliver it, get the learnings, repeat.

It’s been proven to work globally time and time again. When you are asking ‘how di I become an entrepreneur’ though, you might like a few of those steps broken down.

When you have an idea, feed it.

Your idea will need to be nourished, really nourished and looked after from the very beginning to the very end, even after it is running like clockwork and seemingly able to look after itself you need to be sure that the staff you entrust it with are going to continue to fuel and care for your project. No business can self-generate. It needs constant attention, support and growth.

Most people don’t nourish their initial ideas, they find faults, excuses and reasons to pop the thought bubble even before it’s started to form.

Success comes from carefully considering every single idea you have, even ones that seem incredibly risky, stupid or hopeless. Keep an ideas journal on paper or on your computer. Add at least one new idea a day. A great entrepreneur knows how to select the best ideas, for that to work, they need to have a bunch of ideas to choose from, some of them will be terrible, but only knowing which ones are actually bad, is the way to recognise the ones that are great.

There is no such thing as a good idea or a bad idea, they are just ideas. It’s what we do with them that counts.

To make your idea possible in the real world (not just in your head) you need to locate and assemble the real world elements that make it work. My advice here is to start small, your BIG idea might be too complicated. Start at the base of it and give it room to grow, because it will.

For now, search for what you need. It might be people, research, equipment, processes… your pieces will be unique to you and your business.

The important thing is that all these parts are real.

Sure, you can attempt to figure all this out on paper, but you will never know for sure, not in any kind of depth, detail or usable knowledge what’s working and which people are actively responding.

Paper plans are nothing but theory. Real life is the only place for testing and graduating to the next level.

You will spend the first stage of being an entrepreneur deciding on and gathering the parts you need. They don’t need to be perfect parts, they just need to work.

My suggestion is don’t waste time on making it pretty or having everything look nice. Get stage two done as early as possible for the most rapid, flexible and transparent growth of your business.

Step three is where the rewards are. Get there as fast as possible.

You need to have a working version of your idea running ASAP.

As soon as your idea is out and operational you gain real-time feedback, evaluation and information on its performance.

This knowledge is the first gift you will reap for your efforts and seriously hard work.

From this point, you can clearly see where improvements can be made and what your client reactions are.

Be ready for anything, now is when the growth happens. Most businesses find they need to make massive changes, your product might look very different to your idea at this point (another good reason not to spend too long getting your plans and parts perfect- by this point they might already be redundant.)

The people who buy your product or service are the ones who have the say, if you want to get paid it’s wise to listen to them.

For me, this is the best part about being an entrepreneur. It’s so much fun and with each cycle through you gain more; more knowledge, more money, more time.

It’s a good idea to also use your newfound knowledge to reboot or recharge your enthusiasm, determination and follow through. Many new entrepreneurs give up right here. They were expecting cash flow, and all they get is information on how to improve! For some people it’s like a kick in the teeth. They take criticism personally and never reinsert their information back into their business.

If you feel uncomfortable with making mistakes, taking feedback or growth through learning, your idea is never going to make it past the development stages. Every successful entrepreneur made massive mistakes at the start, it didn’t cost them in the long run, most will say it made them stronger. Read any entrepreneurs biography and you’ll see hundreds of their mistakes and thousands of learnings that eventually created a famous brand.

Technically stage three will last as long as you and the idea work together, since you will continue to modify, advance and test, it will just keep looping through. Stage three only really ends when you are completely satisfied with it and walk away to start something new.

Keep going. Replace parts that get old, upgrade wherever you see a new opportunity to streamline, offer more or go a bit deeper. The parts you started out with to build your business were crude, as you progress you have multiple opportunities to explore new options and gradually build something more sophisticated.

As you do you might see new arms of your business sprouting. Just like your original idea, each of these will need to be nurtured and action taken – when the timing is right. If you are still knee deep in your first idea, shelve any new ideas for later, you will need all your focus and attention to get your first product stable.

When you are totally happy with how much you have learned from your projects, then you can step away, let your team handle everything and put your focus into building a new idea. Now that you have some experience every branch you add to your brand will move faster and be more streamlined.

This is when all that hard work and seemingly slow progress pays off. How you become an entrepreneur is all about long-term gains. Many people see the success of those who have already done the hard work and want the same thing instantly. Overnight success takes years of building and work. Be ready for the long road ahead.

Stepping away from your thriving business is the final step to knowing if you have built something genuine. A true entrepreneur can step back from their company and let the team take over. If your business can survive 90 days without you, you’ve done everything you need to do.

Passive income is the real money-maker. When you earn money without going to work it gives you the freedom and flexibility to spend your time doing whatever you like. Cruise in your sailboat, visit an island paradise, have a dinner banquet with your friends and family. This is how entrepreneurs look like they don’t do anything. Underneath the fun and adventure though, they are constantly playing with new ideas and setting new businesses in motion and of course, they did the hard yards way back at the beginning. The sooner you can make yourself redundant the easier making money will be.

Traps to avoid

The idea that sharing ideas is dangerous. It’s not. Sharing ideas strengthens them, builds enthusiasm, and weeds out problems. Overall, ideas were made to be shared.

If someone wants to ‘steal’ your idea, let them, each person will bring their own skills and personality and learning processes so no two ideas will ever be the same. It just highlights the need to get to doing faster. If your idea is still on paper while someone else is out actually testing it, you will never catch up, and vice versa.

Ideas that are original are best. No idea has ever been ‘original’. We each stand on the shoulders of those who have thought and developed ideas before us and we bring our own blend to create something unique. It’s called progress. You don’t have to have an original idea to be a successful entrepreneur, a fresh approach, a new understanding or a new audience is enough. Your passion will be the truest compass to determine what idea will be best for you.

That you are important. You need to be able to step out of the business at any time and know it will be okay. If you are the only one who can do a certain job, or bring a certain skill you are going to be tied to the business forever, and drained, burnt out and hating it. While it might take time to employ staff to help you out, the staff you employ need to be just as good, if not better than you are (hopefully better). If the business stops and starts with you, you’ve built a very low ceiling.

Doubt your ability, success or worth. Doubt cancels abundance. It’s essential that you have total belief in yourself. If you can’t manage this straight off, find people who believe in you and do whatever it takes for that belief to be true. It’s not always going to be smooth sailing. Sometimes you might actually be going backwards, sometimes you are literally going to have to fake it. You just keep going no matter what and with each step you get stronger.

No business has ever failed. Their people quit. 

If you believe in something enough to buy it, there are others out there who feel the same way. Act on your instincts, take it slow and let your business evolve with you gradually. When you are in the thick of it, it might feel like it will take you a lifetime, then, when you are at the top looking down, it will seem like a blink of an eye.

The most important step is that you take action!

Stay troublesome,

Matt Catling