Advice For The Working Entrepreneur

Running a business on the side while working at a day job is a great way to build some true job security and helps you exercise your creativity and passion to the fullest.  It’s not easy to pull this off and to do so you have to have high doses of one ingredient, integrity.

You may be saying to yourself that integrity is the easy part.   Most of us think that we possess a high amount of integrity and in many cases, we do.  When it comes to running a business, there is a small margin for error when you are dealing with clients that have paid for your product/service.

The fact of the matter is that there are many instances in our personal lives where we act and speak out of integrity.  We may tell a friend that we will be somewhere at 10:00 and we show up at 10:15.  Or we tell our spouse that we will get right on something and we finally get to it after our spouse has nagged us about it a few times.  In your circle, you may be known as a highly unorganized person.  All of these things are OK at times in our personal lives because our loved ones will forgive us.  In business, people aren’t as forgiving.

I am sure you have heard the term, you play how you practice.  This is true in business.  In business you must possess and cultivate the success habits to make it work.  You must do what you say you are going to do and you have to be highly organized.  If you struggle with this personally, make sure this is addressed right up front.  Organization is essential in business and they are critical to running a side business.  If you don’t have a handle organizationally, your reputation and client experience will suffer.

I will step off my soapbox for a minute and share my own experience with this or by experience, I mean failure.  My design firm initially started with a couple of guys who had full time gigs at other places.  (One of those guys being me.)  We specialize in corporate and business branding and was fortunate at that time to have some businesses see our work, like it and decide to hire us.

At our design firm, while the end product always looked great, there were a lot of things that we did terribly.  We missed deadlines, our communication with the client was inadequate by any standards and worst of all we were ignorant to the harm that we were causing the client and our own business.

The sad part is that the clients themselves never complained so we thought all was fine.  This was until we were looking at working with another client and they decided not to work with us based off some information that they received from one of our former clients.  It felt like I got punched in the gut.

It was really a turning point for our business.  We had to focus and get more clear on systems and processes and how we would deal with clients.  We went back to old clients and apologized and actually still work with some of these clients today.

The lesson here is that you can run a business while working for someone else but it takes a high level of discipline and organization to make it work.  Once you start traveling on the bad habit train, it’s hard to get off.  In my own experience we corrected it through a lot of tough conversations as well as let time heal old wounds and our reputation.  I would have rather not had to do that in the first place.