Employee vs employer mindset

Most entrepreneurs and small business owners started out their careers

working for someone else.

You might have had a career

for 5 years or 50 years before you decided to start your own business.

Or you may even be working for someone else even as you struggle to

develop your own business in your spare time.

Working for someone else is

fundamentally different from working for yourself.

There is an employee mindset

and an entrepreneur mindset

and they are markedly different.

If you have been working for many years

for someone else,

you may not realize t

hat there is a difference in mindset.

The longer you've worked as an employee,

the harder it is to change this mindset

and start thinking like an entrepreneur.

However, the employee mindset may not

serve you well as a business owner.

In fact, it can work against you to guarantee

that your business never reaches fruition.

As an employee, it is easy

to blame others in an organization

for responding too slowly, for missing opportunity

As an entrepreneur, you are solely responsible for all things, good or bad.

Entrepreneurs create something from nothing, with freedom to chart their path.

You are the sole creator of that destiny.

As an employee,

you were likely responsible for delivering tasks

or accomplishing short-term goals,

but you were likely not responsible for the

long term goals of the company

As an entrepreneur, you have to focus on both short term and long term goals and your vision for the company

As an employee, you likely did not make decisions that had the biggest impact

to your company's bottom line.

Also, you likely had a team of other people

you worked with to make decisions.

For the Entrepreneur,

Discomfort is the new reality.

You don't have all the answers,

and you likely need to make quick decisions

with very little input from others.

As an employee,

you had a narrow scope in terms of your job.

Any training you completed likely

was directly related to your role

As an entrepreneur

you have to wear many hats - project manager, sales, finance, marketing, IT, etc.

As an employee,

you toed the line - following orders from above.

As an entrepreneur,

you aren't interested in the status quo.

You always look for ways to improve.

These are some of the key differences between the employer and entrepreneur mindsets

Next week we look at the small business owner mindset versus the entrepreneur mindset.