The One Thing Business People Seem To Underestimate
Newly entrepreneurs are either unaware or ignore this one thing they are about to experience.
As of the 2020–2021 NBA season, an NBA player’s salary averages at $8 million dollars a year making them considered rich, but not wealthy. The people who give salaries to NBA players are the wealthy ones. There’s no denying that being a CEO of a successful corporation would not just make a person rich but wealthy.
From sending out fliers, door-to-door selling, and building stores to simply social media presence alone, business operations and marketing services had developed staggeringly from what it was a decade ago. Marketing has way more options than ever before making it way easier for small businesses to compete with bigger businesses. With the help of the internet, social media has been the main platform to promote any kind of business venture.
Through the internet, netizens had been seeing, taught, and realize that the only ticket to be wealthy is through building their own business. Upon knowing that a simple job won’t easily make their financial dreams come true, businesses kept booming left and right. However, that thought/idea is a double-edged sword. People began underestimating how risky and difficult it is to maintain a business. It led people to underestimate the one thing successful businesses require:
TIME.
One of the most prominent reasons why a person starts a business is to get away from their current job to leverage their quality of life financially. People began quitting their jobs to start their own entrepreneurship. Instead of working hard from a set time of 9 am to 5 pm to improve other’s business, entrepreneurship offers a chance for a person to work on preferred hours to improve one’s business. But, even working on preferred hours, doesn’t translate to more free time.
Businesses require people to work way harder and longer for it to be stable and keep it running. Beginning it is like driving a car on an endless track. Once it starts running, it could only move forward nor stop.
People seem to forget or ignore the fact that there are businesses dying than living. There are more businesses that undergo bankruptcy than financial freedom. There are more entrepreneurs who forget what it’s like to live on the outside. Business people find it hard to be a normal person anymore as they are imprisoned by its everyday hustle.
Creating a business is way riskier than relying on a job. Jobs provide leave credits, running a business does not. Missing a job for one day won’t be that bad, a day without any sale nor leads are dreadful. Job ends with resignations, businesses end with bankruptcy. A business doesn’t have a safety net. One wrong move could end all of it.
To explain how truly time-consuming it is, let’s look at how much an already billionaire spent his time working in a week:
In November 2018, Elon Musk joined the Recode Decode podcast hosted by Kara Swisher. During the interview, Musk told that he worked up to 120-hours a week during the production of Tesla’s Model 3. On a normal week, he stated that he averages at least 80 hours a week.
Warren Buffett has been known for reading at least 500 pages of different sorts of topics, mainly, financial trends every day for more than half of his life. Buffett estimated that he read for about 80% of his day.
Having a business is like taking care of a baby that wouldn’t grow up. A business is a baby forever where TLC ain’t enough, it needs blood, sweat, and tears as well as long as it is running.
If Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos work at least 80 hours a week, what will happen to those who barely average 50 hours a week?
Honestly, they’ll hardly survive. So, if you’re planning to start, accept the reality that your business is your life now and that’s the commitment you have to face to continuously succeed.