You’ve probably been told being an entrepreneur gives you the freedom and time to live life as you please. Well, contrary to the belief, starting and scaling a profitable business from ground zero requires sleepless nights, utmost dedication, unwavering faith, and sacrifices than you could imagine.
Relative to established organizations, starting up a scalable business can be daunting to figure out. What task should be done with first? What is the best entry points? How to tell whether a product has a place in the market? How can you hire the best team? And the list goes on.
Entrepreneurship is not for the weak and faint-hearted. It comes with a degree of uncertainties, challenges, and sometimes depression. However, the fulfilment one gets when goals are met, milestones are crossed, and substantial growth is attained can change the story instantly and heal the years of frustration and pain.
As a promising young entrepreneur, which do you think is your best bet to fast-track your entrepreneur journey? Your guess – working for a startup!
Working for a Startup can educate you on the overall uncertainty of a workforce in flux as you’ll have the upper hand learning from other people’s experiences instead of being the lab rat.
To make this article interesting and help you relate better, I will share my personal story in the entrepreneurship journey.
Challenges of Entrepreneurship
Starting a business is associated with many challenges and difficulties. While some see it as just starting a business, it should be understood as the process of providing goods and services to people in exchange for money. An entrepreneur is not only a person who acts but thinks. Being an entrepreneur involves thinking of new ways of solving problems and creating value. It cannot be imagined without innovation and risk-taking.
When I finished my National Diploma in Computer Engineering around 2014, I was enthusiastic and eager to start a company. I was a young chap full of dreams and, at the same time, naïve. I thought all that it ever required was having passion and studying relentlessly. I took a different seminar on entrepreneurship and attended various training. I had always wanted to help businesses in Africa grow through digital marketing. In no time, I registered my first company Webiguys Innovations, with my cousin as a Co-Founder, with who I shared my ideas, but it turned out he had no slight interest in my escapades. Everything then falls on me – planning, executing, reaching out to small businesses in the neighborhood, and all that.
Funding the business was another challenge as I thought my rich uncles would support me to actualise my dreams. That didn’t happen, and sales were stagnant as it occurred to me that people primarily do not buy ideas but the result, which there was nothing to show as at then.
Read Also: 5 Important Lessons Budding Entrepreneurs Should Learn From Fejiro Hanu CEO of Patricia
Soon reality hit hard, and I realised I had to get a job and learn the entrepreneurial skills, attitude, doggedness and mindset for a mighty come back.
Many entrepreneurs are like my naïve self then, only optimistic and turn blind eyes to the possible challenges that could come up in building their startups. They mostly think they have it all figured out, and it should go according to plan until otherwise.
The High rate of Startups failure
According to Investopedia statistics –
In 2019, the failure rate of startups was around 90%. The research concludes 21.5% of startups fail in the first year, 30% in the second year, 50% in the fifth year, and 70% in their 10th year.
In an interview conducted with several business owners, reasons for failure includes running out of funds, being in the wrong market, ineffective marketing, a lack of research, bad partnerships, and not being an expert in the industry.
When further researched, the primary reason was lack of product-market-fit due to lack of experience creating a sellable product.
While I have worked for 3 Startups in the past five years since I quit my startup, aside from working freelance jobs, I have been exposed to the various challenges and exponential future possibilities that is fast-tracking my entrepreneur journey. I have had a good, bad, ugly, and incredible experience working for these startups. So, it is an excellent breeding ground for the skills, knowledge, and mindset needed to start an entrepreneurship journey.
Below are the benefits of working for a startup and how it can fast-track your entrepreneur journey.
5 Reasons You Should Work for a Startup
1. Become Better At Managing Uncertainty and Challenges
While working with one of the leading cryptocurrency companies in Africa – Patricia, at the period when the company was doing amazingly tremendous and being the first to introduce Bitcoin Debit card in Africa and making 10,100,000 unique transactions across all her products and services, there came the CBN circular to banks prohibiting banks and other financial institutions from servicing crypto exchanges. The circular implies that the company could no longer receive and payout to customers with Naira.
Amid this nightmare, Patricia remained undisturbed and took proactive steps. Its headquarter was flown to Estonia and introduced Peer-to-Peer trading to keep the business afloat, solving this challenge for the entire African crypto community.
As shown below, Patricia’s CEO, Fejiro Hanu, gave a mind-blowing statement on his medium page regarding the memo.
2. Working Closely and Learning From Your Company’s Leaders
In my first Startup job with a Digital Marketing agency, I had a super awesome experience learning firsthand from the CEO Gbenga Ogunbowale, who happens to be a Mandela Washington fellow, YALI alumni, and having a dozen awards and recognition to his name. His ability to plan and manage people while investing time in training the team is superb. For an entry-level into a Marketing role with no prior experience, I learned faster under his leadership. I was promoted to Chief Marketing Officer in less than six months due to his consistent training and passion for building people. Likewise, in my second startup job, I had the opportunity to work closely with both the Managing and Executive Director. Even though the experience turned out ugly, the company went bankrupt and owed some months’ salary; I learned the possible outcome of lousy leadership and overhauling staff from their mistake.
3. Think Like an Owner
While working for a Startup, you are expected to become emotionally invested. You are meant to contribute your ideas, effort, and talent beyond your given role and be recognized for your input to the business’s success.
You have the upper hand to practically think like a boss and take initiatives like it is your own.
4. Exercise Your Leadership Capabilities
Some Startups have no clear hierarchies or paths in place and are working towards developing processes and structures that will aid advancement. They need exemplary managers to create and effectively run departments such as marketing, product, sales, and relations during this stage.
You can easily win the spotlight by going the extra mile to create some of the processes that would be invaluable to the organization’s growth and earn yourself a position at one of the high tables, which will get you more deeply involved in the development of the company.
For instance, at my second startup job with a Real Estate firm, I went outside my job responsibilities as a Digital marketer to develop the company’s profile and immensely contribute to articulating a more precise and concise vision and mission. For that, I was appointed as the Vice-chairman of the management team.
5. You’ll be instilled with the value of hard work and self-sustainability
Maybe more important than any other benefit of working at a startup is the realization that hard work, creative thinking, and tenacity are worth a whole lot. Once you’ve created something of your own sweat, something tangible and whole, something you can touch, feel, or use, you really begin to appreciate personal ownership. You’ll more than ever be confident in what you can do, the business you can build, and what the future holds for you as an entrepreneur.
Working for a startup vs big corporate company
When it comes to a duel between working for a startup and corporate, you probably should first understand the basics of each type of workplace and primary intent. Think about it: A startup may provide more flexible hours now, but will it give you the ability to move up into a senior management position in the future? A corporate job may be the perfect place to get structured on-the-job training, but will it give you the creative thinking skills you need to open your own business in a few years?
To fast-track your entrepreneur journey, you want to work in an environment that would make you a creative thinker and equip you with the skills needed to open your own business.
You might do the same set of tasks for several years at a big corporation until someone above you retires or gets a promotion. While at a startup, your role and responsibilities will frequently evolve, even multiple times a year. Within six months, you might be doing something significantly different from the position you were hired to do. That means your skill set will have to grow at an equally fast clip.
The type of work you perform will change based on the organization’s current challenges. Whether launching a new product, working with an extensive client for the first time, redesigning the website, or trying a new marketing campaign, startups are always experimenting. If you’re committed to learning and adding value, your priorities will shift with every trial and error.
At a big, established company, most roles are highly specialised, and when a new problem occurs, it will be addressed by the person or team with that specific set of skills. If you try to solve a problem not related to your department, you’re likely to step on some toes.
At a startup—especially a very small one—nearly every problem is an opportunity for you to step in and add value. One of the great things about the rapid pace of startup life is that you’ll have the chance to learn various transferable skills needed to build your business ground up than you’ll do in a big corporation.
Conclusion
Working for a startup will teach you to live with stress and pressure and hustle or develop creative solutions. It teaches you to become bold, take risks, set your direction, and move fast along. It is your training ground to make you self-reliant, persistent, resilient, quick, agile, and execution-driven.
So, before you start your own business, it is the most effective conduit to work for a startup and see it as a fertile ground for your transition into entrepreneurship.
