20 Important Experiences From 10 Years of Self-Employment Part 1 - Starting a Business

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20 Important Experiences From 10 Years of Self-Employment Part 1 - Starting a Business - On April 1st, 2006 I started my own business and it was the start of an exciting and varied time.

I have now been self-employed for more than 10 years and during this time I was able to gain a lot of experience.

I would like to tell you about 20 important experiences from my self-employment in a small series of articles, starting today with my founding days.

Parts of the article series:

Starting a business
Building your own business
Everyday life and private life
Remaining successful

20 Important Experiences From 10 Years of Self-Employment Part 1 - Starting a Business

20 Experiences From 10 Years of Self-Employment

I only wanted to collect 10 experiences from my self-employment, but as I gathered ideas for this article, there were more and more.

I now have a total of 20 important experiences on my list that should be of interest to founders, but also to those who have been self-employed for some time.

These are of course very personal experiences and every self-employed person will certainly learn different things and have different experiences, but I think that many experiences are very similar and those founders, in particular, can learn a lot from them.

Experiences From When I was Founded

In the following, I will go into the first 5 important experiences, which mainly come from my time as a start-up entrepreneur.

Expectations of Independence
If you deal with self-employment in advance and read books on it, for example, then that very often sounds pretty cool and perfect.

I prepared intensively for my independence, read books, searched websites, participated in a start-up course, and a lot more. Together with the image of the self-employed in public, which is often not very realistic, I approached self-employment a little naive.

In reality, you quickly notice that self-employment is not a sure-fire success and that the many plans in advance are important, but generally, things don't go as planned.

It took me a little while to get used to being a self-employed person. Long working days, little and irregular income, sacrifices that have to be made in the beginning.

I got used to it and since I enjoyed my work, it wasn't a problem to work more for less money, so in my job beforehand.
Self-employment is no picnic and certainly not the quick route to success and wealth. Instead, independence means a lot of work, nerves, and difficult times, but also fun.
Getting Started is Important
In the beginning, I put a lot of things off for a long time. So I had the idea for my blog back in 2006, but it wasn't until 2007 that I started. In retrospect, that was also good and I'm glad I started the blog in the first place, but I put other things off for a long time.

For example, I could have started with other websites much sooner and reduced my web design services even faster. I also started very late with videos and only dealt with my products after many years.

In general, however, I've also had the experience that many don't even start. They plan and think, read and learn, but they don't start. That costs time and wastes a lot of potentials.

I would never start without a certain amount of planning, but you shouldn't let that become endless, but start implementing it as early as possible. The experience you gain is worth more than any theory you can read.

For new projects, e.g. for niche websites, I try to get a first website version up and running as quickly as possible. And I don't wait forever for other ideas and plans either, but try to get started as soon as possible.
Don't wait forever, get started. An idea is not worth anything in itself; only its implementation makes it something special.
Have Goals and Visions
This experience is closely related to the beginning. As much as you rush into your day-to-day business and as intensively as you work on your business, you should always have goals and visions to know where you are headed.

In the 10 years of my self-employment, I have already started one or the other project that didn't work out. A common reason for this was that I didn't have long-term goals and visions for them. Sure, you don't have to know exactly where you want to be in 10 years for every small project, but in my experience goals are very important.

Otherwise, you lose yourself too quickly in the daily routine and no longer know where you want to go. That costs motivation and you can no longer work efficiently.
Set goals and have visions of where you want to be in the future. These will certainly change and adapt over time, but they are still very helpful.
Be Skeptical
When you become self-employed, you look for help online and outside of it. That is completely normal and fundamentally also important. However, of course, many others also know this and therefore there are a lot of dubious or useless offers.

At the beginning of my self-employment, for example, I let myself be persuaded to advertise my web design business. In the end, that cost me a lot of money and didn't bring anything.

But there are also many tempting offers and information online that are particularly aimed at founders. Riches are promised that can be achieved without work. But pyramid schemes can also be found, which also promise easy success.

As a founder, it is very difficult to judge which of them is good and which one should keep away from. Therefore one should be skeptical in principle. If you keep in mind that success on the Internet can only be achieved through hard work and patience, you can expose many offers on the Internet for what they are, empty promises.

And otherwise, you should be careful if someone wants a lot of money from you and promises things that are too tempting.
As a founder, you should learn very quickly to distinguish the serious from the dubious offers. Above all, one should be skeptical if something sounds too good to be true.
Discipline Makes the Difference
As a self-employed person, you can work when you want and you can also do free when you want. As a founder, I thought that too.

In reality, however, it usually looks like that in the first few years you work a lot for relatively little money. Even if I don't like the saying “myself and constantly” in and of itself, because it shouldn't be permanent like that, this usually applies in the beginning. First, you have to build a business with income and that usually means little free time and a lot of work.

It happened to me too. But now my work was also a lot of fun, so that wasn't a big problem at first. But that is not always the case and you inevitably have phases where you are not as motivated. The only discipline helps here.

I have certainly learned a lot in my self-employment and I still do that today. One of the most important qualities that I have acquired, however, is discipline. “Going to work” every day of the week, doing chores that are not so much fun, and always getting over your weaker self, require a lot of discipline.

In retrospect, discipline is one of the most important success factors for me and I wouldn't be where I am today. Over the years I have seen so many promising projects come and go on the Internet. In most cases, a lack of discipline was one of the main reasons for failure.
As a self-employed person, you need even more discipline than others, because you are solely responsible for everything and nobody is behind you to drive you.

So It Goes on

In the second part of this series of articles, I dedicate myself to 5 experiences related to developing your independence and important success factors.

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