By Nathan Camp
- This is the 2nd part of a 3-part blog series around things I’ve learned as a new entrepreneur. If you missed the first part, you can click here to read it.
4. There is a sense of God’s kindness and nearness that an entrepreneur experiences.
Yesterday, we started the day with nothing. No calls. No prospects. But as I pulled away from our last job for the day, having crushed our daily sales goal and with the sun setting, I couldn’t help but thank the Lord for His goodness. He showed up. He provided. He was there. There’s something about taking leaps that helps us to feel the hands of God – catching us afresh – that we don’t feel when standing on the shore.
5. You will have people who support your vision, and those who will want to tear it down.
I’ve been surprised by who has been my biggest supporter and who has resisted this journey’s start. I’m not talking about my family, who have been in my corner every step of the way, cheering me on. I mean friends who have spoken blessings and grace over me. It’s been said to me before, “When you struggle to have confidence in yourself, use some of mine for you – I have plenty!” Those friends are game changers. I truly believe the voices you surround yourself with might be the distinguishing difference between the joy and the dread of being an entrepreneur.
6. There’s never enough money. You can’t buy your way to success. It’s earned on the shoulders of scrappy people who just make it happen.
You know the old saying, “With enough time and money, we can do anything” – Well, of course. That is not the world 99.99% of entrepreneurs find themselves in. We are often rich in vision and poor in finances. What separates entrepreneurs from others is that they find what “can” be done. There is always something you can do with the resources you have. Often, in the corporate space, there’s a sense of “we can’t do that because we lack the resources”. But for the entrepreneur, they wrestle with this kind of lack, phrasing the tension as a question: “What can I do today, without the resources that I wish I had?”
7. Your past experiences – even those that seemingly aren’t connected to entrepreneurship – have prepared you for this more than you know.
Launching out into a new vision, especially one that carries the sense of God’s call, will bring you face to face with the reality that life has been training you for these days. You might not have gone to business school, but you will see that the lessons you’ve learned on other teams, spaces, and places have put tools in your tool belt that you didn’t even know were there until this journey. But, as the pressure of leading your business brings about it moments of where don’t instantly know what to do, your heart and mind will draw upon experiences and voices and lessons and skills, that were taught in unconventional places that seemed to have little to no bearing on your life in their genesis, but here, in these embrionic days of your business, are making all the differnce.
- Look for the final installment of this series soon!