I couldn’t sleep. No matter what I tried, the excitement, nervousness, and and jitters wouldn’t wear off. I knew that this was a really GOOD thing or a really BAD thing. On one hand, starting a business should be exciting – there should be a certain amount of anticipation in making the decision to quit a job that you actually like a lot in order to venture out into the cruel world of entrepreneurship. On the other hand, was this just a moment of what the book The Emyth calls an “Entrepreneurial Seizure”? [the drive to start a business, with the naiveté that tells you you can become entrepreneur, technician, and manager all at once]. Was it doomed to fail? These questions kept me up, night after night. I was exhausted. Prayers. Fasting. Serious conversations with my wife.
As I was up late one night stewing about the future, and a thought came to me that I now consider revelatory in nature. It went something like this:
“The amount of fear you feel shows the amount of faith you have.”
…or lack thereof. I took this as an answer of sorts. From that moment, it wasn’t a question of if I was going, but when. I have always wanted to be in business for myself. I wanted time, the opportunity to be financially secure, and I wanted autonomy. I honestly had a pretty good thing going with Nifty Marketing, my employer at the time. In fact, if I would have stayed, I probably would have had at least two out of those three. But I went for it. Mid-Novemeber of 2016 my life changed forever. It set off a chain of events that I can only explain now as miracles. I had no idea where I would get clients, just an excitement and confidence that if I worked hard, they would come. And come they did. Within a couple of months, I had a pretty decent client load and was already approaching the money I was making at my previous job. The stress level was about the same, but I had more time with my wife and could work whenever was most productive for me. We took a few trips and I was able to manage the entire business with just a laptop and an internet connection.
The Next Step
I have enough work to do for myself, and being able to be the owner, the manager, and the technician has been a real blessing for me. I’ve learned not only the mechanics of client work better, but how to plan from a 30,000-foot view of the business. My next step is to scale the business and bring in talented individuals that can help take it to the next level. I have no idea what the future holds for me or Morningdove Marketing, but I have the same excitement and confidence as I did when I set out.
