Why Being An Entrepreneur Should Be a Realistic Career Choice For Young People
Most young people see getting a permanent, full time job as the only option to take after finishing their education. The idea of going into self employment as a freelancer selling their skills, or becoming an entrepreneur and selling a product or service they have invented, sounds like an impossible pipe dream.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Being a self employed entrepreneur can and should be a realistic career choice for young people. For starters, thanks to online freelance marketplaces like upwork, it’s very easy to simply go online and find freelance work in just about any field you can think of. If you have marketable skills like web design, software development, web marketing, finance or copywriting, you will be able to visit these sites, search for and bid on projects. You could be working on fee paying assignments within days.
It’s never been easier to be a freelancer and it’s a growing industry. Another reason that you should consider being a freelancer versus employed is that studies show that freelancers are more satisfied than the employed.
Whether you are working as a freelancer, selling your services or working in employment, you are now perfectly poised to make the next step into self employment by starting your own business or creating your own new product. Don’t give up your day job or your freelance projects just yet though as studies show that people who work part time or full time while developing their entrepreneurial venture cut their risk of failure by 33%.
Of course it’s not easy to innovate and create an exciting, effective product from scratch. One of the easiest and most tried-and-tested ways to innovate is to adapt an already working innovation from one market or country and introduce it to your home country. This type of innovation is called adaptation.
One of the best ways to innovate through adaptation is to travel the world, experiencing different cultures and countries and looking for ideas and innovations that you can bring back and try out in the UK domestic market. Current circumstances make mean that the travel option is not viable in the short-term.
This is of course not the only way to innovate and start a new business. This article by xxxxx, titled ‘xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx , provides some excellent tips on how to start out as an entrepreneur. I have summarized them below:
1. Choose Your Friends Wisely. Set up a business with someone you trust and who has useful skills that complement your own skill-set. If you are good at tech and process, then your ideal business partner might be good at sales and marketing.
2. Find a Mentor. They’ve done it all before and can provide invaluable guidance and useful contacts.
3.Get Comfortable With Failure. The reality is that all the best entrepreneurs failed several times before they hit the big-time. It is part of the learning process.
4. Use Indirect Success Techniques. Visualization, meditation, work-life balance, exercise are all techniques which help to optimize your performance.
5. Write a Business Plan. You’ll need this if you want funding and it will also provide strategic direction.
6. Get Comfortable Speaking. Pitching, presentations, negotiations are a core part of winning business and gaining market share.
7. Understand Money, Not Just Work. If you’ve watched TV shows like Dragon’s Den you’ll know that quickest way to frustrate/alienate an investor is having a poor grasp of financial matters and numbers. If you are looking to secure funding for your start-up you could try xxxxxxx which is a online funding resource which enables you to apply for online and be connected to funding providers.
As you can see, there are other opportunities for young people outside the traditional fixed employment career path as a self employed professional or even as an entrepreneur. It’s time to make a choice.
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