Start a business, they say. It’ll be fun, they say. Oh, but those of us who have dove head-first into entrepreneurship know first-hand that the fun you have is not as abundant as the hard work it takes to get there.
There are many keys to creating a successful business and just taking the first step often means you have found that first key of creativity and faith – the initial idea to build upon and the bit of craziness to make it happen while believing it will be worthwhile.
When you become an entrepreneur, it’s almost as if you’re taking everything you’ve learned in your life (and things you begin to learn along the way – thanks to YouTube, Google, and now TikTok) and you’re putting each of these things, these keys, all together on a keychain. Your entrepreneurial keychain.
You put them all on the little loop; One at a time, building your keyring to a better future, each key as valuable as the next.
The Key for Desire: As you desire a better life for yourself and your family.
The Key for Passion: This one is what gets you out of bed every day and excites the flame within.
The Key for Hope: When your first attempts fail but you keep going and hope for a better day tomorrow.
The Key for Overcoming Obstacles: This one helps you hurdle through the early, mid, and late obstacles that every entrepreneur faces and must overcome.
Each entrepreneur’s keychain will look a bit different but those keys guide both the business and the person throughout their entire journey. Some keychains start small, with only Hope, Passion, and a Prayer dangling from a thin loop while other people bring years and years of experience to the table, their heavy keychains wrought with opportunities and keys that are bent, chipped, damaged, and fraying.
It is all these keys together that create an entrepreneur and these keys that help you through each door of your journey. The problem is that many people lose sight of their keys along the way. As their keychain grows, finding that first key for Hope or that tiny one for Faith sometimes becomes harder. Those keys get overshadowed by some of the bigger ones and eventually, it all becomes a big jumble, hard to sift through, and impossible to unlock the door you’ve been waiting outside of. The door for the next opportunity. And this is often when entrepreneurs stop having fun.
But the key to unlocking these opportunities and enjoying your business and the life you’re creating should be the one you never lose sight of Resilience. This is the most important key for any entrepreneur as this is the one that pushes you to keep trying to unlock the barricades in front of you, even if it seems they’ll never open.
Resilience will keep your spirits up when everything is going wrong. Resilience will give you the strength to keep sifting through your big pile of keys until you find the one that will work. Being resilient will push you forward when every ounce of your being wants to rest. For most business owners, the Covid-19 pandemic forced many of us to pull out our keychains and find any way possible to keep going, survive, and in some cases even thrive.
Those who pulled out their resilience keys have adjusted, pivoted, doubled down, and worked through. Unfortunately, as strong as some entrepreneur’s resilience, passion, hope and faith were their journeys were still cut short. Sadly, this pandemic has closed too many doors but hopefully these strong, resilient business owners hold tight to their keychains full of experience and lessons as they continue on to their next adventure.
At FanSaves, we have had to pull out our resilience key many times over the past years. We have had to pivot, do back-flips and spirals, and figure out ways to keep moving forward. Our entrepreneurial keychains have taken a beating over the years but we’re proud to say that we continue to rise.
Our goal has always been to support organizations and businesses. Our success depends on the success of the people we support to help them generate more revenue, even if they are forced to pull out their resilience keys and adjust their business plans.
The key to our start-up has always been resilience and we have seen first-hand how important it is to have it when growing your business. Your entrepreneurial keychain will only continue to grow as your business does and our hope for all entrepreneurs is that they don’t lose sight of the important keys when they need them the most.
by Shannon Ferguson