Not everyone has necessary ingredients for success as self-employed

Dr Hilderbrand Shayo

AS a way of earning a living, operating your own business has two characteristic features.

One, is that you do not submit yourself to a selection procedure; there is not, as there is with a job as an employee, a filtering carried out of possible submissions for a vacancy.

There is no personnel manager exercising a battery of emotional test or crafty interview questions to judge your appropriateness for the job or level of skill you have attained.

You are the sole judge of your fitness to start and run your own business. This put a very heavy accountability on your self-knowledge, because without a doubt, unless proven wrong, not everyone is suited to being an industrialists or being self-employed (aka mjasiriamali).

My ten years of swotting industrialists or self-employed folks make me to believe that the only external check on an individual fitness to run a business might occur if an individual need to raise money, in this case, a bank manager or other lender or investor judges you.

But experience shows that by the time an individual reach this stage; she/ he may already have committed time and money to his/her project. Option to the predicament of this selfselection process is self-analysis: know your self.

From my judgments on assessing self-employedindividuals, their business success and business failure, knowing yourself contains minimum of twenty-three critical questions.

Self-employment demand disciplined inscribed on self assessment on questions such as:- can you work long hours, do you have persistence and stamina, is this business more important than for example family, if the business struggle for five years, would you keep going, is financial success your main guide to what you want to achieve, do you keep going until a task is completed, can you live with insecurity and about job and income.

Others are can you take criticism, do you believe your success will be dependant on outside factors, do you set your own high standard to compete against etc.

When you have conceded out selfassessment and examine at the pattern, the greater your plausible success as a business owner.

Such self-assessment process should provide some succour in answering the question “Am I the right sort of person to succeed in my own business?

This is important because some people talk of number of years of turning their own show but never take the ultimate step. Why do some folks break the mould, while others only dream of it?

The second unusual characteristic of starting your own business to create your own income is that you decide what type of business it is and what market you will be selling to.

In real world of work, while you can select a salaried job in a firm of a particular size or selling to a particular market, you are restricted by the vacancies that are available.

When it came to establishing a business, in theory, the world is your oyster. For the benefit of those who don’t read much, oyster is the common name for a number of different families of salt-water bivalve molluscs that live in marine or brackish habitants.

What I have learnt over businesses I have been privileged to study, a well-run business should successes in any market, but would find it very hard in a declining or restructuring sector of the economy. In practice, however, you can make success more likely by choosing yourproduct and market prudently.

Why? How frequently do you overhear, or partake in, conversations that run along the following lines: In a couple of years

I would like to start off on my own if I can, I would love to have my own business but my financials commitments mean that I cant take that risk, or some are variant?

Quite a number of people dream of running their own show, but not all take the plunge. In some ways, it is hardly surprising that entrepreneurs are slow to take concrete steps towards making their business a reality.

Lying ahead of them, may be for a number of years, is the unknown: financial insecurity, long working hours, long term financial obligations and, at the end of it all, possible failure.

What is the different about those who jump and those who only talk? The conservative image of entrepreneurs is of a strong-minded, positive risktaker with a sense of destiny, seizing the ever-present opportunities.

Well, this may be a reasonably close approximation of some successful entrepreneurs and you may be that sort of person, but this doesn’t explain why you are starting your own business and why now.

There are many people like this who stay employees for the rest of their lives; and many more who start a business ‘accidentally’, but make a great success of it.

One plausible explanation for why some start a business and other don’t is that those who go solo have received a rude shock to their lives. Their previous cosy existence has been disrupted, such as by redundancy or a pay cut.

There are plenty of other reasons that may sway you towards starting a business, for instance being sacked, not being promoted as expected.

Or having your ideas at work rejected, feeling undermined, having a new boss foisted on you, being transferred to a different job or location, retiring but finding you need extra money, reaching a milestone age and feeling you have yet to achieve anything worthwhile, or realising that corporate life doesn’t provide the security or sense of worth that perhaps it did so many years ago.

Another catalyst could be seeing a friend or colleague in similar circumstances to you successfully making the break into self-employment.

My opinion, once you have drawn up a list of intentions that you hope to achieve from being your own boss, you need to assess how realistic these are.

A number you will find fit ideally with the notion of being self-employed; other will be quite contradictory. At the end, part of your self-analysis should be to see how good or bad a match your objectives are to the reality.

Remember, not everyone has the necessary ingredients for success and in reality, there may be many people who live out their working lives as employees who possess the vital skills and characteristics in full, but fail to take advantage of them.