Do you think you’ve got the stones to be an entrepreneur?  The cajones?  The balls?  The ovaries?  The guts?  Of course you do.  How many people who say they want to be an entrepreneur, when pushed, actually break down and admit that they can’t cut it?  In my experience, not many.  Being an entrepreneur seems like it is the new Doctor or Lawyer in terms of the cool thing to be successful at.  It certainly hasn’t always been that way, and of course there are many who still think the golden path to success is layered with extra years in school and an advanced degree.  I’m not saying they are wrong – those are fine professions that can often reap great financial, and often personal, benefit.  However, I can honestly say I have yet to meet a completely content lawyer.  I have met a few content Doctors and Dentists that are reasonably happy in their career, but most of them are older.  Even those ones invest a lot of their discretionary income in unrelated businesses (with a super high failure rate unfortunately).  And don’t get me started on the poor souls who lose their life to Wall Street, consulting firms, and investment bank and the other 100+ hour work weeks all in the name of career advancement.  Good for them, no thanks for me.

The younger Doctors and Dentists that I know aren’t operating in the medical field that used to exist.  There are a lot more rules and regulations, and many of them are taking (gasp) jobs working for large medical companies.  Some of them are simply taking over “Dad’s” practice, or worse yet, using his money to build an exorbitant facility.  Seriously, have you seen some of these places new Doctors/Dentists are building?  I don’t get it.  But anyhow, I digress. The consultants and investment bankers and other Ivy League jobs that still await newly minted MBA’s from the top schools are continuing to pay well, but there aren’t as many of those jobs available as there used to be.  And besides that, most of them suffer for years until they can find the time (or get the guts) to leave and join a company with some sort of entrepreneurial flavor anyway.  Others will stay at the McKinsey’s of the World forever, and they will most certainly create a lot of wealth for themselves, but again – no thanks.  That path isn’t for me, and once again, I’m guessing it isn’t for you.

I’d venture to say that most people aspire to work for themselves and have a life they can truly call their own.  I’m guessing if you are reading this, you’d like to work for yourself.  You’d like to own a business.  You are tired of being subjected to decisions that really aren’t yours.  You are tired of Corporate America and you’d like a change of scenery.  You’d like to create your own opportunities that generate wealth for you, your families and your employees.  Those are all noble goals.  You do not have to be an entrepreneur necessarily to create opportunity and wealth though.  You can work at Bain & Co. or B of A for 35 years and have opportunity and wealth for both you and your family.  So it must be the first part that attracts you to entrepreneurship – the working for yourself part, right?   While I’m sure when a lawyer finally makes ‘partner’ status, or a consultant is moved up the chain enough at the Investment Bank, there are layers of security that create a feeling of having ‘arrived’.  I can’t help but wonder though if that compares to the satisfaction of getting to that same place, but from within a company you really helped build.

Working for “yourself” as the saying goes, isn’t really for ‘yourself’ at all.  Almost any great company I know of has partners, investors, banks, board members and such that really make it group of people working for ‘themselves’.  Semantics aside, it’s still this type of environment, where you alone or you with a group, own a company and run it day to day.  That’s what you want to do, right?  That’s what you talk about doing, right?  Talk is cheap though.  Action speaks louder than words.  There really is only one way to find out if you can answer the questions at the very beginning of this post.  How is that you ask?  By failing.  Yep, failing.

It’s highly unlikely that your first entrepreneurial venture will be a large financial success.  It is unlikely it will be a financial success at all.  Perhaps you will buy yourself a job and make a few bucks, but in the previous paragraphs that wasn’t what you were aspiring to, was it?  You wanted a permanent lifestyle change.  You want to be your own boss.  You want to build and own a part of something that you genuinely helped create.  You want all the financial success that you would have had if you stayed in the fill-in-the-blank-here career all of those years.  In order to do that – in fact, the only way to do that – you have to understand that failure is a legitimate option.

What do I mean by that?  Of course I’ve heard the saying ‘failure is not an option’.  And I totally agree.  At the risk of sounding like I have MPD, I’m not saying you have to accept failure.  In fact, abhor it.  I am saying that it’s a concept that you can learn to master instead of suffer from.  How?  By recognizing failure quickly and either changing direction to avoid it (if possible) or doing everything you can to quickly recover from it.  The first part is where the great entrepreneurial stories come from.  The near-death experience of company XYZ that paid it’s last dime for payroll, product, advertising, rent or some combination of that in order to rise again and make it to the top of the widget world.  Maybe that will be you.  Awesome and congrats.

What is more likely is that you will find yourself, at some point, stuck with a business and a financial situation, that are going to be difficult to fix.    So, what do you do?  Having learned from failures of my past, I’d simply say this.  If you are going to continue forward because being an entrepreneur is the choice you’ve made, hurry up and fail so you can get the mess cleaned up and get on with the next thing.  Fail fast.  Fail inexpensively.  Fail without risking it all.  Gone are the days that you have to risk everything you have in order to be an entrepreneur.  With the advancements in technology and the steep discounts in international labor and materials, there is just no excuse for blowing your every last cent on a business before you find out it won’t work.  There is no honor in throwing good time and money after bad.   Have the guts to say “this isn’t the one” and move on.  Have the guts to say “I did all I could here, I’m going to do something else now”.  Have the guts to admit that you failed.

Let me reiterate that I am not suggesting you wimp out and jump ship early.  No way.  Never.  What I am saying is understand that entrepreneurship comes with success and failure.  It’s just part of the deal for most people.  So if you can recognize it quicker, minimize the time and money damage, and move on – it’ll be that much sooner and closer to you big win.

So go on now, get out there and FAIL!  Just remember, a success is waiting around the corner.

Alex, the author of The Entrepreneurs Blog, is the Managing Partner of LC Management, a multi-industry holding company which was founded in 1998 by Alex as a self-made, boot-strapping entrepreneur. LCM is invested in a variety of startup, growing and mature businesses from several industries, including (but not limited to) international franchisor, venture capital firm, consumer technology, internet software, commercial real estate development, franchise restaurant chain, and other minority equity ownership interests in LLP’s and LLC’s. Alex was included by Business Magazine as one of their “top 40 businesspeople under the age of 40”. Alex also was a partner who successfully exited three previous ventures (technology, large franchisor and multi-state restaurant chain) and is a current Board Member of both of his Alma Maters business schools. Alex also teaches a class one night a week on Entrepreneurship at his Alma Mater and hopes to evolve someday into a full-time high school business teacher and golf coach. In the past, Alex has served on the board of several local and national entrepreneurial organizations. Alex has a BS in Business Management as well as a Masters Degree (MBA). He has an unhealthy obsession with golf. Alex’s most successful business deal was getting his wife, Natalie, to marry him. Alex and Natalie are the proud parents of a beautiful little girl and enjoy a quiet life in Utah.

Alexander has blogged 36 posts here.