Welcome to entrepreneurship! It’s a crazy, wild ride with the best and the worst times. Here are some of my biggest tips. Number one: Don’t feel bad when you struggle to enjoy every aspect of the business. Most of us get into something because we like one or two parts of it. For me, I love the creation process as well as the custom design process and then the profit at the end and seeing the statistics on how my business is growing. Some of my products I can’t wait to make and others I wake up in the morning dreading having to do the order for it that day. In a bigger company, you could hire and train someone to do the parts you really hate, but for me, in a business where I am the one and only, it’s all on me and that can be really stressful sometimes. I’d also say that it’s okay for you to not enjoy every moment of business ownership or entrepreneurship. I promise that even if you’re excited about it during the day, being up at 2am night after night trying to keep everything together will make you have moments where you literally wish you could snap your fingers and have the whole business disappear. It’s like anything else in life: going to college, being a parent, having a best friend. Some moments make you cry with joy and others make you want to claw your own eyes out from the frustration. Another important lesson: Make sure you have time for the other parts of your life, and for the other parts of your identity. Be it student, friend, sister, spouse, parent, child, make sure that the things that matter to you still have their proper place and the appropriate amount of time given to them even while you’re running a business. It’s so easy to get caught up in the day to day of being an entrepreneur but it’s so important to have priorities and keep those in balance. I enjoyed being a business owner, but I struggled to ever find a weekend where I could just relax or really have the time to hang out with my friends. I know if I had a spouse and/or children that would have been a lot harder for me. One of the scariest parts of closing my business earlier this year was knowing that I’d lose a huge part of my identity. I’ve had businesses since I was 12, and so at 20 (almost 21) I was going to be without a business venture or plan for the first time in almost half my life! It’s been over 6 months now and I’m good most days, but I can’t help but feel like if I had kept my life in balance a bit better, that wouldn’t have been so devastating to my self-concept.
Last week on Thursday we did the sell anything challenge, which was something I was not looking forward to. We had to make $100 in a day, and the places that would have made it easy like on campus were off limits. We ended up selling at a local grocery store for 3 hours each. It was 35 degrees outside and a miserable winter day (It was November 1st, but that's about accurate for Rexburg to be so freezing in fall). We split into teams of two and did a fundraiser for a woman named Razia in Pakistan who needed help feeding her buffalo so that it will produce milk to feed her family. Since we had to provide a product as well, we sold pencils. But really, it was a fundraiser because that is what made people support us. Nathan and I raised $46 during our shift and Emma and Halla raised $69. I was nervous about making the required amount because we'd be outside in the cold on a random Thursday and uh... selling pencils for a Pakistanian buffalo. And Rexburg isn't the most philanth...
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