The Weeds of Entrepreneurship
Have you ever had a day, maybe even a whole month, where you feel like you gotten caught up in the “weeds” of entrepreneurship? It can be a muddy, thorny, unpleasant mess to get stuck in the weeds of owning your own business.
What are the weeds of entrepreneurship? Think of the work of starting and running your own business like that of planting and growing a garden. You have a vision to grow something. You turn the soil, plant the seeds, water the seedlings, protect them with a fence, add fertilizer, add stakes for support, pray for sun, and prune the plants. You step back from the rows of green leaves and that’s when you notice…weeds creeping up around the edges of what you have worked so hard to grow.
Entrepreneurship is a LOT like gardening. After years of backbreaking work to grow something beautiful, weeds can crop up and take the joy out of your mission. These surprise visitors can take many shapes and forms. Cash flow issues, parent complaints, student attitudes, employee gossip, problems at home, health issues of your own, and the list goes on.
It doesn’t matter what the weed is. You need to deal with it immediately because weeds can grow ten times faster than the good stuff if left unchecked. One day you’re walking around your business-garden admiring the fruit of your labor with only a bit of concern about the weeds creeping in at the edges. The next time you look you’re shocked to find weeds in place of what you took so much time to nurture.
We’ve all listened in shock before at “sudden news”. A studio closes, a parent leaves, a student drops out of school, an employee goes off the wall, a marriage blows up, a tough diagnosis is given, and more. But, usually there is nothing sudden about a lot of the tough news we get– it’s just a weed that has been growing for a long time and finally got tall enough to be seen above the plants you were actually trying to grow.
Do you have any weeds that you need to deal with today? Whether personal or professional, inside yourself or outside yourself, we all have some weeds in our gardens. Look to yourself and your own attitudes, actions and behaviors and then look through your garden. The smart gardeners take care of issues as they crop up.