Virtual Assistance and You

Lately, I’ve been noticing many articles about unemployed people giving up on job hunting and deciding to start their own business.

Now, I certainly have experienced the humiliation and discouragement that often accompany job searches. Been there more often than I like to admit. Can’t blame anyone for giving up and inventing a new approach.

Actually, since I believe we should live first and make money second, I celebrate, applaud, and praise to the skies any effort to realize (make real) the most direct manifestation of your own personal gifts. Everyone should make a living by the strength of their best native capabilities.

There’s that one hitch, though. That one thing that no one can circumvent. If you’re going to start your own business, you have to learn how to do business, and then you have to do it. I am hoping that people who feel driven to self-employment understand what’s involved.

Make no mistake, doing business is a very different thing from being an employee (or an academic). You may have a product or skill, but you need business skills and capital as well or your endeavor will fizzle.

You trade the servitude of employment for slavery to business demands. If you don’t thirst for that kind of obsession, owning a business may not be for you.

Business is something it’s best to be passionate about. Someone in my networking meeting today said, “I’m all about marketing,” as if he was a car covered with stickers hawking widgets. When you’re in business, you’ll encounter many peeps who are born to the trade (as it were!). People with market savvy in their genes.

But another person in my networking group told his story of having a lifelong dream that now, in his retirement years, is at last manifesting. A traditional job took him for many decades in another direction, but his dream never entirely faded. Now, his return to authenticity makes his current enterprise eminently attractive to customers. So this fellow’s not only experienced in business, he’s operating from the heart. That’s the optimal combo.

(Perhaps ideally, we’d all be working in the best expression of our native skills from the start. We’d focus on identifying our dreams, and then assimilate the necessary business acumen to see them through.  Unfortunately, it usually works the other way around, if it works at all. People spend years just doing business, and only later on turn to focus on their dreams. To me, this is backwards.)

So what if circumstances have left you jobless, the search for employment has been fruitless, and you’re at your wits’ end, but you have no experience as a business owner? Learn, learn, and learn more through reading, networking, going to conferences, and any other opportunities you come across. Team up with others who do have business skills. And most of all, be patient with yourself. You can learn this stuff; it’s not rocket science, but it’s also not assimilated in a day.

Do what you love, respect and learn the processes and morés of commerce, and your new enterprise will surely prosper.

An inexpensive way to be supported in your new business is to work with a virtual assistant. Please contact me for a free consultation about the ways a VA can help maximize your business assets and boost your productivity.

(Image by rachaelvoorhees via Flickr)