Ep # 13: The lesser-known side of entrepreneurship.

Hello! and welcome back to yet another episode of my podcast. In today's episode, I'd like to highlight some lesser-known facts about entrepreneurship. What goes behind the scenes? What goes on in the mind of an entrepreneur? What does the world behind all the glitz look like? So, let's dive in to find out.

It's time to have a word with me, Rajive Dhavan. 

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to yet another episode of my podcast this week. Let's look at the rare side of entrepreneurship. Most people think that entrepreneurship is all about being on top of the hierarchy and having fancy titles. It's all about par and the free will to do whatever we want, isn't it? But isn't an entrepreneur an employee?

What goes behind the scenes for an entrepreneur? Let's find out. It's time to have a word with me. Rajive Dhavan. See you on the other side of the intro. Music.

The typical external perspective of an entrepreneur is synonymous with power, freedom, and having the last word. It's true to a great. But this outlook is only a tiny part of the whole deal, at least in the case of those who've built a successful business that's managed to survive and thrive the test of time for years.

For the uninitiated, let me tell you that entrepreneurship is a pretty heavy responsibility. It's about being available for your people, and it's about making sure that they. But at the end of it all, an entrepreneur is just another employee of an organization. It's his job to look for the best interest of his team and customers while ensuring that the organization stays afloat.

It's an excruciating balance to maintain. An employee always has the liberty to go wrong, make mistakes, and in most cases, get away with it as well. But when an entrepreneur goes wrong, he's under the scanner with all the spotlights facing him; he's probably going to be known for everything he's done wrong and less likely for any positive impact that he's made so far.

But at the end of the day, he's an employee too. He can go wrong as well. Every mistake that an entrepreneur makes has a tenfold price to be paid by him. And most people on the outside hardly have any idea about this. As an entrepreneur, you can build the best teams, give the best perks, and set the best cultures, but if you do go wrong somewhere, you'll have to take the brunt always.

There will never really be an exception. An entrepreneur needs a solid support system, genuinely interested in knowing what's happening and how the entrepreneur can be held. It's the entrepreneur's job to engage and motivate his team consistently. But who motivates the entrepreneur? Nobody really. So entrepreneurs have to pull themselves up every time they fall.

A good support system, though, will help them a great deal. When we talk to people, they have an assumption that to be an entrepreneur, the first thing and most important thing that we need is a lot of money. But the matter of fact is that an entrepreneur actually needs a very solid, strong support system.

You must have heard of people saying that. I started my business with nothing. You've also heard of multimillion-dollar companies that were started out of their garage, but did you ever come across a single entrepreneur who says that they could do it without a solid support system? I'm sure you. And that's exactly why a solid support system, unfortunately, is a very underrated tool for an entrepreneur.

The other dark side of entrepreneurship is also that it's a very lonely road. The moment we take up entrepreneurship, we have to be mindful of the fact that it's going to impact our relationship with our friends and our. And that's because entrepreneurship will extract so much time and effort from you that you will be left with very little time to devote to other people in your life.

Most people also confuse entrepreneurship with leadership. They think that just because they're entrepreneurs, leadership is in them by default. But the way you have to work towards being a great entrepreneur, you'll also have to consistently work towards being a good leader. Good leadership is never a default setting in an entrepreneur.

So, on the one hand, there is this vulnerable entrepreneur, and on the other hand, there is an entrepreneur who's probably completely unaware of what's happening, whether it's through entrepreneurship or generally in a company or a corporate role. Sometimes people end up in a leadership position that they don't really justify.

It's their understanding that leadership is all about calling the shots. It's all about the pomp and show. It's about fancy titles and whatnot. But the first rule of leadership is to understand that it's not a crown. It's a job, a job that requires us to remember that we are just an employee of an organization, and an organization is bigger than everybody else.

The clock starts ticking when we, as leaders, begin to think that we are the organization. In this world, which is so fast-paced, it's easy to get carried away. It's easy to bring in our egos and go off track, and that's fine as well. While we, entrepreneurs, are employees, we are humans first. We can go wrong at times, and that's the only way we can move ahead.

The biggest and the brightest entrepreneurs have made decisions that they regret or don't find wise anymore. In hindsight, it's easy to. But when we are in a war room-like situation, there's so much pressure that anybody can break. Even entrepreneurs, for that matter, entrepreneurship does have their fair share of perks too, but that's because the risk is so much higher.

What most people see from the outside, though, are just the perks, the books. The reality is that an entrepreneur is constantly walking on a tight. If he's visionary and confident, he will come across as a dictator, calling all the shots. If he's too confused and always unclear about what he wants, he may come across as we can unfit.

So the balance between knowing when to lead and when to follow is what one must always strike. The best leader knows that, and this is what differentiates an average leader from a great one. If you're an entrepreneur, I'm sure you'll be able to relate to these things, and if you're somebody who's planning to get into entrepreneurship, you better understand these things.

A lot of us want to know what goes on in the mind of an entrepreneur, what goes on behind the scenes, and the topic of entrepreneurship and its dark side is incomplete. Without discussing the episodes of recent layoffs in my previous podcast episode, which is episode number 12, I did discuss how one can handle it.

That is from the point of view of an employee. But what happens if you are the founder of a company or the c e o of a company and you are doing the layoff? You are the person who's responsible for the layoff. That's a picture which mostly doesn't really come out in its twist sense. But one thing that can be taken as a matter of fact is any entrepreneur who's put in his labour to build a company from scratch or from the ground up will never find it easy to take a call to lay off his people.

Nobody hires people just to throw them off one day because it takes a lot of time, effort, and money to build a team. And a layoff in most scenarios is the last. More often than not, an entrepreneur has to decide whether he wants to lay off a few people and keep the company afloat so that some people at least continue to keep their jobs and the company goes on, or should he take a call?

To completely shut down operations and lead towards the closure of the company itself. When a layoff happens, by default, the blame completely falls on the top. Management. The blame is always on the c e o or the founder of the company first but in most scenarios. It's always our collective responsibility to make sure that the company is surviving and thriving through thick and thin.

The responsibility lies with every single person who's working in the company. It's a question we should ask ourselves. Are we giving this our best shot every single day? The journey of entrepreneurship has too many moving parts, and it's almost impossible to cover every single thing that happens behind the scenes or runs in the mind of an entrepreneur in a single podcast episode.

However, I've tried my best to cover some of the most important aspects and give you some insight into what goes behind the scenes, and if you've managed to stick around this far, I would just request you to rate this episode because that would mean a lot. As always, I hope you liked this piece of content.

If you did, please share. I'm sure you will positively impact someone. Thank you.