Starting Your Own Business

The Opportunity Cost of Entrepreneurship

Written by James Garvin for Gaebler Ventures

Becoming an entrepreneur is a big decision. It's guaranteed that running your own business will teach you many marketable skills. Learn about marketing, accounting and management first hand with your own business.

For many, we all have ideas and dreams of starting and running our own companies, yet many of us never take that leap of faith to full-time entrepreneurship nor even part-time.

Many view the cost of taking the leap too costly and risky with foregone income and benefits as you struggle to get your idea off of the ground. However, entrepreneurship offers more than just the hope of attaining riches.

Starting your own company will teach you (one way or another) all of the managerial skills required to lead a team, to develop customers, to sell, market, and manage the finances. No where else can you learn hands on so many trades that are in demand across all industries today and tomorrow than by doing it through your own company.

But what about my pay check, health benefits, and comfort of my full-time job you may ask? Sure, we all have to pay the bills and the scariest part of entrepreneurship is the unknown of tomorrow.

The skills obtained from entrepreneurship are skills that will be valued for a lifetime, not only by you, but by companies and organizations who like everyone, need managers and executives who have learned valuable lessons first hand. When challenging yourself to take the leap towards entrepreneurship, broaden your views on the potential benefits that you will gain outside of just the potential monetary payoff and evaluate the professional and human capital that you will gain through the experience.

So if you are itching to be an entrepreneur, but too timid to take the leap, just remember, that you are immersing yourself in a career rich experience that will pay dividends even if you do not strike it rich with your venture. The lessons from failure of trying far outweigh the skills you will obtain performing the same remedial tasks at your day job.

This is exactly why so many Venture Capitalists often fund serial entrepreneurs after failed start-ups because they know the lessons that they have learned in their failed start-ups will help them adjust to do things better the next time, reducing the risk of failure for a second, third, or even fourth time.

James Garvin began his education studying biotechnology. In recent years he has turned his interest in technology to helping two internet startup companies. The first business was an online personal financial network and the second was an e-marketing platform created to help entrepreneurs demo their web sites. Currently a student at University of California Davis, James is spending his summer incubating two new online businesses and writing about his entrepreneur experiences.

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