An entrepreneur by definition is someone who has decided to take control of his/her future. We often start with nothing more than a good idea and a lot of determination, but are we cut out to run our own business with all that entails? I developed this simple quiz to help new home stagers gauge their ability to think like an entrepreneur.
1. You get a business referral for a project in your area. You know this person has been given your contact information.
Do you:
a) Wait to hear from the potential client and assume they hired someone else if they don’t contact you?
b) Wait a week to contact the person so they won’t think you’re too desperate?
c) Contact them immediately to introduce yourself and express your interest in learning more about their project and how you can help them?
2. You discover there are other competing stagers in your area.
Do you:
a) Assume the market is saturated and give up your dreams?
b) Decide to go into business anyway and charge less than the competition (or give away lots of free services) because you’re just starting out?
c) Research the size of the market and evaluate whether that sounds like enough potential work for you and your competitors? (If you’re a home stager, for example, this would mean researching how many homes are for sale in your area over a year and dividing that by the number of home stagers you can find.)
3. You invest in your own web site. After less than two months, you’ve only had one project or client.
Do you:
a) Decide the Internet is a bad way to promote your business and take down your website?
b) Decide to run a newspaper ad or send flyers door-to-door instead?
c) Evaluate whether your web site has had any traffic. If it has, you try to determine whether there is anything you can do to encourage more of the visitors to actually contact you?
4. You’ve been operating your business for several months but you don’t have as many sales as you’d like.
Do you:
a) Sit at home and wait for the phone to ring?
b) Spend hours discussing your lack of projects and hoping someone will give you the “quick and easy” solution to building your business?
c) Research marketing tactics, business building ideas and strategies for dealing with the “slow times” and take action to change your situation?
I listened to a very interesting teleclass recently. The topic was the shared characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. One of those characteristics was a “sense of urgency around achievement.” In other words, entrepreneurs don’t wait for success to happen. They take action to make it happen, and they treat their business as a main priority not something to get around to sooner or later.
As you might have guessed, you are thinking like an entrepreneur if you answered “c” to all the questions above. Running your own business isn't easy. It takes perseverance when many around you are giving up.
Debra Gould, The Staging Diva
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging
Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is President of Six Elements and creator of The Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. Debra has staged hundreds of homes and has used her expertise to train over 700 home stagers worldwide.
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