At some point in your journey toward self-employment, you'll cross a line between embracing the attitude and initiating action. We've reached that point in our discussion here. The path still isn't exactly clear, but it may be much better shaped than you realize.
"You'll be in business long before you open the door," says small business maven Paul Hawken, author of the ahead-of-its-time landmark book, growing a Business (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1986).
One of the key attributes of entrepreneurship is being able to observe the landscape in which your work is being carried out; to look at your own work from a distance, so you can see its intrinsic value and how else it might be applied profitably. There's nothing mystical about this. It's a discipline easily learned if you're willing to commit concentrated thought to it.
Here's how: Put aside the details of your specific work duties and begin to identify the general activities that are key to success in the way you work. It could be crafting or creating products or services, managing others to do so, knowing how everything works in your organization, engaging customers in the opportunity to do business with you.
These are the places to look for identification of your true strengths, as well as those that can be transported to another industry or another content area, if you will. These are your functional or "soft" skills (even though they may be highly technical).
General categories include finance, managing, marketing, training, and sales, operations and systems. Now, define your strengths further: perhaps its motivating professionals in a small sales office. List every strength you can think of. Just make sure you're listing functional tasks you excel at, not limited to your kind of business. Next, put a star beside any functional skill you've put to use at more than one job or enterprise. Pick one or two at which you feel you absolutely excel and love doing.
Now you can begin the imagining process: Where else would these skills be valuable? What would my business look like if I based it on these abilities and services? Who would my customers be?
This is really the key to a self-directed career: to pinpoint the greatest value that you bring to projects and identify the key customers for that value, whether it's within an organization where you're currently working, in your own enterprise or in some combination of the two. As soon as you begin applying that outlook, you're self-directed. And the self-directed attitude soon lights the path we're looking for. This is what Paul Hawken meant when he said, "You will be in business long before you open the door."
Alec Thorne, a Hartford, Connecticut-based management consultant, recalls that, before going on his own, he spent about a year at his previous employer weighing options for the kinds of work he'd seek if he began his own business. In his role as an accountant in a practice of 10 professionals, Alec had been exposed to dozens of local businesses and had often given his clients advice that went beyond basic accounting.
Several of the firm's clients were law firms, and he noticed that three law-firm clients in particular seemed to have extraordinary challenges in structure and operational issues. In his spare time at home, Alec began to study principles of management consulting. Then one day, a law firm client called to ask Alec a question about compensation plans for law firms. Alec seized the moment and three days later submitted a proposal for an organizational assessment project. He was in business before he even opened the door, and Alec's story illustrates several points that are key to the process of choosing a path:
His new enterprise was based on first-hand experience with a similar service. He possessed enough curiosity and passion for his subject to study it before he knew he'd soon be earning his living at it. He recognized a new opportunity to add value to an existing relationship.
Building directly on your experience may be the best route to a self-directed career, but it's certainly not the only one. Often, the question is, "How much of a leap should I make between what I'm doing now and what I'd like to do on my own?"
What would you like to do? How can you afford to do anything else? You may always find a difference between what you like to do and what you're good at. But chances are, if you're pursuing the thing you really love, your ability will grow. It may also be true that love grows along with doing what you're good at. But why take any chances? Make loving what you're doing the top priority.
