To Quit or Not to Quit? Many new entrepreneurs have unrealistic expectations, so when they don’t meet them and still go on to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars into their new business, they start to blame it on themselves and question whether or not the business was a good idea in the first place. We all know this happens and there is often an enormous amount of guilt after a business failure, yet it is not our responsibility to ensure that a business will succeed and we need to hold ourselves accountable for our own actions. We may have chosen a business that wasn’t going to work for us but there is still no way we could have known that in advance. Yes, some entrepreneurs are just not meant to be and may need to either start over or move on to another career. There is nothing wrong with that; we’ve all experienced career failure from time to time. I’ve heard from many entrepreneurs who started businesses that they weren’t ready for. I myself am in that situation as well. Here are two stories for you to consider, The First Story: Sherry was desperate to find a way out of her day job. She had been there for a couple of years, and the job just wasn’t what she expected it would be. She thought it would be like her last job, but it wasn’t. The job required her to type a lot of documents on a computer and send them out to different departments. The job was not only difficult, but it also bored her to death! The last thing Sherry wanted was to have to do the same job day in and day out, and that’s what she thought she had been signing up for when she first started. But the job had only grown harder for her and she didn’t like it anymore. She hated going to work because she hated sitting at a computer for hours at a time. As we talked further, I learned that Sherry was really struggling to make ends meet. She didn’t have enough money to support herself and wasn’t able to save anything at all. She had very few choices left to make in life because the next thing she was planning to do was to file for bankruptcy. I encouraged her to think about a different type of business, since we were talking about starting a business, but this isn’t the path she was envisioning for her life. So I asked her to think about another idea for a business that she might be interested in instead of bankruptcy. I’m always excited when someone asks about a business opportunity because it could potentially be a good fit. Usually I get one question, “What business are you referring to?”, and when I say it’s a business opportunity I usually get another question, “Can you tell me about this business?” But Sherry seemed really interested in the business that I mentioned. Sherry kept telling me she didn’t really have any business ideas or experience in running a business, but she had been looking for a business opportunity for months. So I gave her the numbers for a business opportunity that had been going on for a few years and thought she might be interested in it. As she began to talk about it, she asked about the types of businesses I’ve owned in the past. She got really excited when I told her about my experience working for Microsoft. The most important thing that she mentioned to me is that she had never taken a job from home. I have several women friends who do a lot of work from home, so this was not something unusual to me. But Sherry hadn’t done any work from home. Sherry was at that point where she was stuck, working in a job she didn’t like with absolutely no hope of improving the situation any time soon. She was looking for a way out. I told Sherry that I think she might be qualified for the business she was speaking about. We talked about it some more and I told her that I thought she might really enjoy it and enjoy the work as well. I knew she liked my business and she had told me she was looking for a business that involved selling, but she didn’t really know anything else about what I did. I explained to her that I sell information products and teach other people how to sell information products as well. I told her about how I could take a look at her website, offer to look at the links on the site, get her some quotes for services to enhance the website and then make a few suggestions. We were able to get everything set up on her website and then she started marketing the site by herself. She was having a real problem with a lot of traffic coming to her website and it was because she was using a dial-up connection and the slow download speeds really prevented the sites from loading quickly. I suggested she either get faster internet or to stop working from her home and go into an office to work on the site. When she came back a few weeks later, she had a lot of success and was making a lot of money. She was so excited about making money and doing something she loved. She said, “I can’t believe it. I never imagined I’d be able to make all this money and love what I’m doing. It feels really good.” This is the story about Sherry’s new business. A business that enabled Sherry to make more money than her job did at a comparable pay scale. A business that she worked hard at and still works at today. And a business that is in a way, a part of her identity; she actually describes it as an extension of herself. She doesn’t have to go in to an office to work every day because she can work from home. She calls it her “office”. She still works out of her home but the only difference now is that she is selling information, not typing documents and sending them out to people in other departments. She has much more freedom now that she works from home. She just needs her computer and an internet connection. She can do it anywhere. “If I have lunch with my friend in Boston, I’m still in touch with her, and she’s still in touch with me, but I’m not here, and she’s not here,” Sherry explains. Sherry doesn’t know what her business will look like in 10 years. She’s planning for 10 years from now. “It could really take off,” she says. This is an example of how a business could be a perfect fit for a person if they are creative and willing to try something new and do things differently. We all like new things to try. I told Sherry that I would think about another business for her to consider and that’s when she told me about the business that I had told her about first. She thought that it sounded really good because she was so interested in information products and that is why she was always looking at books on the subject. She said, “I love books, and I love information products, so this is the kind of business that would fit my style.” I told her I had just started another business and that we could probably start this new business together. I had not mentioned any of this to her previously because I didn’t think it would be a good fit for her and it wasn’t going to make her happy. The Second Story: I was talking to a lady about the business opportunities she was considering. I thought she might be interested in my business. She was talking about a business she had mentioned to me before but she had only started working for it a few months ago and she wasn’t too excited about the new business. She said she was about ready to quit it as well, but she said she liked the people she was working with. She didn’t say it, but it was the same person who suggested her to go work with them. This lady was considering one of those work at home opportunities, but she did not understand what they were, so she had a lot of reservations about signing up for it. I asked her what her objection was to these types of opportunities and she gave me an example of a bad experience she had with one of the business opportunities she was considering. She said she started working with this particular business but that she found out that the products the company was selling weren’t really what she had been looking for. She felt like she had been taken advantage of. After hearing her story, I asked her, “Why do you have all these concerns about work at home opportunities? Are you worried that the people you’re going to be working with are all going to trick you? You know that wouldn’t happen, right??” She didn’t believe that. She kept telling me that she was in a lot of pain and didn’t feel like this opportunity would be any different. I kept telling her, “We’re talking about business here. This isn’t work at home. This is a business opportunity, and you just have to do your homework about it and make sure it’s right for you.” Her answer was, “But that’s what I don’t like about them. Nobody ever tells me that. It’s always a surprise when I find out, that’s why I don’t want to do it.” She continued by saying, “But with the other jobs, I do know that if I’m unhappy in the job, I can quit. I can move on. But with this type of