Entrepreneurship: How to decide what business to create.

Today I want to talk about something that I LOVE: entrepreneurship. Often when people hear this term, they think of guys like Jeff Bezos who started an online book store in their garage and went on to become one of the wealthiest people in the world as the leader of Amazon.

But the type of entrepreneurship that gets me so excited is the type that I’ve lived for the last 5 years. Small scale entrepreneurship with no agenda of becoming one of the largest companies in the world.

My business, Lyndsey Fry Hockey, seems pretty straight forward. Olympic hockey player running hockey camps. Seems pretty simple, right? But what people don’t realize is that there is a lot going on behind the scenes that is required to ensure everything operates properly. Incorporating your business, getting camp insurance, building a website, creating registrations and building a network of partners to actually make your business work are just a few things of many that need to get done. That is often what stops a lot of people. They may have the best plan in the world but when they realize the amount of time required to do everything yourself and learn new things along the way, they decide it isn’t worth it.

Maybe you or someone you know has been in this situation before. But here’s the best part… It isn’t that you aren’t capable of being an entrepreneur and starting your own business. Odds are that you just haven’t found the right business to pursue!

So how do you know when a business is the right business for you? The answer is pretty simple in my mind. When you enjoy the daily process of building your business more than the final outcome, you’ve probably found the right fit. In other words, you need to find something you LOVE. Building a business from the ground up takes a lot of work and the payoff in the first few years relative to the time you invest is LOW. If you start thinking about how much money you’re making or how many Instagram followers you’re going to have right out of the gate, then you will more than likely fail because you won’t have the patience to get to your end goal.

Another important component of this that makes running a business different than a hobby is that someone actually is going to have to buy what you’re selling at some point. This means that in order to be successful, you have to be (or quickly become) really good at something through hours of practice and then find a way to align that skill and your brand with some sort of customer need. If you are super passionate about building puppet show characters but nobody is going to buy them, it doesn’t mean you’re bad at making characters, it means that you have an awesome hobby rather than a business.

Figure out what people need/want and find something you’re skilled at and love to fill that need. Once you’ve done that, you will know that you have found the right business for you to create.