Coach Thibodeau presents a brief coaching moment for prospective entrepreneurs, framing the costs of learning to run a business as an "education tax." He contrasts two ways to pay that tax—working for someone else to learn with lower risk, or "cowboying it" and learning by doing—which offers ownership but drives high failure rates (claims ~80% fail).
Coach Thibodeau here with this week's coaching moment. Occasionally we get asked, if I want to start my own business, what should I do first? Honestly, you should probably think about how you want to pay your education tax. Your education tax is what it costs you to figure out how to run and own your own business as well as understanding the industry that you're in now. One of the common ways of paying that is by working for somebody else. Working for somebody else affords you the opportunity to learn from them because they're already doing it without really having any of the risk. Another real common way of starting your own business is to just cowboy it, get out there and learn what you need to learn through the school of hard knocks. Now that's a pretty cool way of doing it because you really own what you do and what you achieve. But it's also one of the things that causes 80% of businesses to go out of business.
