The Fear of Business Part I

I never thought that I would own a small business (or any business for that matter). I was raised with the belief that job security and a good pension was way better than the risk involved in owning my own business. My father worked as a correctional officer for 30 years before being medically retired due to an auto accident that occurred on his way to the prison. He very much believed in loyalty to your employer and the trust that you will have a pension that sustains you into retirement. Of course I very much ended up just like him, spending 26 years in the US Air Force as both an enlisted man and an officer.

The fact of the matter is I have no idea how to be a businessman. Even when I worked on the corporate world, I always assumed that I was doing it wrong because of the time I would spend just trying to figure out what I should be doing. As far back as I can remember I had always wondered what a real business person did all day. When I got my first desk (I must have been a Technical Sergeant at the time), I can remember being excited about it but then that quickly faded when I didn’t know what to do with it. I had a chair and a computer, some drawers and shelves, but I had no idea how to operate that weapons system as we used to say in the Air Force.

Fast forward to today and as I sit here with a laptop typing out these random thoughts and I still feel like that youngster with a new desk. In the beginning of this new adventure I had thought that I would just read a bunch of books and that would fix me but nothing so far. A good friend of mine has sent me several very good pieces on business but I remain fuzzy on how to apply that knowledge.

In the end and to wrap this up in a relatable way, I tell anyone out there who is looking to start a business; just take the plunge. Are you going to make mistakes? Yup. I sure have, mostly with money management, but I am getting better. Take each day as it comes and try to learn from your experiences. My co-workers and I used to talk about how its ok to make mistakes but to make the same mistake twice is a lesson-observed, meaning I had a chance to fix that problem but I either didn’t address it or I failed to come up with an acceptable fix. Take your knocks and learn from them. Don’t let them get you down. I’ve only been doing this for a short time and I know that I still haven’t got it down, but I’ll keep trying.