Evan Carmichael outlines four steps to entrepreneurship: find a genuine passion that adds value, work in your desired field to learn operations without risk, treat that job as education, and study how successful entrepreneurs built their companies. He launched a biotech software company at 19 after researching Microsoft and Intuit's strategies.
Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Bridget, who wrote in saying she's not sure if she has what it takes to be an entrepreneur and wanted my advice on what to do. So Bridget, I think a lot of people go through this before they start their own business. I think the best thing you can do is start by tapping into your passion. So the number one thing for entrepreneurs starting a business is follow something you're passionate about. Do something that gets you excited, something that you think you can add a lot of value and help people out. That's kind of number one. So the next thing is you don't necessarily have to start your own business from the very beginning. I would go, you know, work for somebody else who's already doing what you're trying to do. So whatever your passion is, look at, you know, again, that what excites you, where you like helping people, and find somebody who's already doing that and offer to work for them. And what I try to do is get involved in that business as much as possible. So you're working to learn. You're still working for somebody else, but you're working with the goal of eventually being able to become an entrepreneur. So you want to learn as much as possible about how that business runs. Try to, you know, take in extra hours, help the entrepreneur as much as possible, You ask any business owner, there's always too much work that they're doing. So, you know, when star employees come up and say, "Hey, can I help with something?" They love it, right? Most employees don't take that extra initiative. So if you could be that person, you'll get a whole bunch of new responsibilities, often things that you weren't hired to do, but it will really help your education because you're doing this not necessarily for the money, but you're doing it for the education. You're doing it to learn how to run a business in that industry. You may discover that this isn't what you thought it was, that you're not really excited about this, it's not your passion, you don't really want to open up a company in that space. And it was a great learning experience, and you did it without having to invest a lot of money. In fact, you were paid to learn about it. So, you know, if that's not the situation, go out and find another job, again in a similar industry that you think you're really passionate about, you want to learn more about. So that'd be the easy way to kind of get started. And then the last thing I would recommend is modeling success. So try to find people who've accomplished a lot in your area of choice and look at how they got started. And I see that usually it helped for me when I had my first real company. I was 19 years old, biotech software company. I was a young guy, didn't know what I was doing, had to go out and start selling this software, totally afraid. So I just started researching other famous entrepreneurs who had sold software. I thought, you know, I'm not the first guy to go and try to sell software. So I researched companies like Microsoft and McAfee and Intuit and looked at how did they get started. Not how did they, you know, make an extra million now, but how did they go from nothing to getting that company off the ground. And I looked at their strategies for success and pulled that into my business as well. And that was able to help us grow. And that kind of gave me the confidence to know that, hey, these guys started from nothing, just an idea, and look what they were able to turn it into. If I could do even a quarter of that or a tenth of that, I'm still mega success. So looking at those stories and seeing how they came from nothing, just like where I was, gave me extra motivation and extra belief in myself that I could do it. So hopefully that helps. So make sure you follow your passion, work to learn, go to find, you know, a job in your industry that help you learn about the industry, and then model success to give you confidence and ideas to be able to launch your own business. Hopefully that helps. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. And if you have a question or if you have something to add to this video as well, I'd love to hear from you. If you want to leave a comment under the video, and we'll see you on the next episode.
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