TranslateDoing what you love can certainly help your chances of success. When you enjoy and are passionate about your business, prospective customers can tell. Your enthusiasm makes them feel good about supporting you. Bloggers, reporters, and others in the media will also feel inspired and want to spread the word. Doing what you love also helps you maintain your energy level, even at 3 a.m. when you’re only halfway done assembling a big order that must ship in the morning. It makes you willing to work 24/7.
However, what you love can also potentially hurt your chances for success. How? Doing what you love may get you so excited that you neglect the business side of your business. You might underprice your product or service—you’d do this for free, so you’re thrilled just to be paid. You don’t monitor your cash flow or even do much bookkeeping. After all, the money’s going to come, right?
Doing what you love can also blind you to outside opinions. If your business lacks processes or systems, you and your team won’t be very productive. Your employees won’t be as excited as you about working late every night. Or perhaps you’re so convinced your product is perfect the way it is that you ignore valuable criticism from friends, family, and prospective customers.
Doing what you love IS important. Overdoing what you love is the danger. You should start your business around what you love. To make it succeed, you must learn to love everything else it makes you do, learn to love (or at least respect) every aspect of entrepreneurship—including bookkeeping, making cold calls, packaging your products for shipment, and all the extra stuff that goes along with turning your love into a real business. To succeed, you can’t just do what you love. You have to do the hard, dirty grunt work that creates a viable business. And you’ve got to learn to love it because only then will you have the stamina to stick with it as long as you’ll need to succeed.
If want someone to help you learn to do what you don’t love, SCORE mentors can teach you the basics, from how to create a cash flow statement to how to market with social media and more.
