Life lessons in business: Taking personal inventory

When I left college, I started my career as a software engineer. I was good at software and quickly won the respect of my peers and management. Within a few years, I was informally running the entire department from a technical perspective and my managers made a fateful mistake: they made me a manager.

I lasted less than a year…

One common mistake businesses make is thinking that if an employee is good at a job, she will be good managing a team of people doing the same job. The problem is this: managing a team requires a different skill set. You can be a great software programmer but a horrible manager of software programmers.

I was a horrific manager. I was fresh out of college with numerous rigid beliefs, unrealistic expectations, and no shortage of self confidence. Within months, I was miserable and my team was miserable and my managers were looking for a way out. They moved me back to an informal leadership position and shortly afterward, I moved on to another company.

I say that to say this… Many people make the same basic mistake when they decide to start a business. They are good if not great at something. Maybe it is baking. At some point, after enough people tell them they really need to start their own business selling their pies, they do. And in most cases, it doesn’t go well.

It turns out that baking pies is a very different skill set from running a business that sells pies.

If you bake pies as a hobby, your only responsibility is baking. If you bake pies as a business, you bake but you also have to do financials, purchase raw ingredients in bulk, market your pies, manage people, and develop systems that control the quality of your pies. You have to worry about insurance and cash flow and inventory and a million other things.

I am not saying you can’t make the transition from baking pies to a pie business. I am just saying you need to examine yourself as to whether you are ready for the additional necessary skills and will enjoy doing a bunch of new things.

Many people really struggle with that adjustment and it manifests itself in several ways. For example, some baker entrepreneurs might hide in the kitchen and ignore the other aspects of the business. Others will get so focused on the business that their baking will suffer. And some will grudgingly take on the additional responsibility but hate it. In short, their business that seemed like a great idea will ruin their quality of life.

If you have a choice (and I acknowledge that sometimes we don’t have a choice), we should make career decisions based on what we are good at and what we enjoy. There is a Biblical basis for that. God will not speak to you and tell you what to do with your life but He will equip you with skills and talents that align with His purpose for you. In addition to that, there are numerous passages that suggest that He wants you to find purpose and enjoyment in your work (Ecclesiastes 2:24).

I am not saying these things to push you away from starting a business. I just want you to know what you are signing up for and I want you to take personal inventory. An awful lot is at stake.