Yesterday I advocated a “mind my own business” mentality as opposed to a “working for the man” mentality. I’ve seen this demonstrated so vividly in the way Nashvillians have dealt with our flood. I haven’t seen one house or one neighborhood sit around waiting for the government to take care of them. What I have seen is literally hundreds of men, women, and children doing the back-breaking, nasty, repulsive work of cleaning out the sewage and the muck that a flood always leaves behind.
I’ve seen hard-working people get in and take initiative. And that makes all the difference.
So let’s apply this same “mind my own business” mentality to starting a business. My question to you is, “Why would you ever work for someone else?”
I know that there are some that should; hospitals, other kinds of organizations that need systems and people to fill them. But still, even then, you are working for yourself.
There are three things people think you absolutely have to have in order to start something. And they would be wrong. Here they are:
- If you’re going to start a business, you need cash. I heard a guy just the other day say that he was going to start the business of his dreams and he was going to have to borrow a million dollars. I thought, “Oh, what a prescription for disaster.” You don’t need a million dollars. You don’t even need two dollars. Cash is way overrated. Most people have cash and burn through it because they don’t have any business sense.
- You don’t need connections. I’ll be the first to admit that connections are important. The mission statement of the church I serve today is to “help people connect to God and each other.” But that having been said, you don’t have to have a lot of connections to start out with. Who does? You build them over time.
- Some people believe in order to start something big, they need control. They need control of market shares or sources of production; they need to be able to somehow have superior knowledge that’s not available to others. And they would be wrong.
How many times have I heard people give excuses as to why they can’t do something only because they don’t have the cash, they don’t have the connections, or they don’t have the control? These things are nice and they come with time. But no one starts out with them, unless of course you’re a Vanderbilt, a Getty, or a Carnegie.