Becoming An Entrepreneur:
After having had a long and fairly successful corporate career, I wanted to create a business which would allow me to give back to the world at large and make the best use of what I am truly passionate about - leadership and coaching. This has led me to create I-Empower Learning, an organization focused on delivering leadership and life skills coaching to youth and school children.
Initial Challenges:
The key challenge was to identify a significant problem that I could solve by using my key skills and strengths and then to give it a shape of a product that could be commercialized and scaled up. In order to develop the product suite of I-Empower, I had to engage with a large number of educators, parents and students to understand the missing link within our education system. Once that was done, the next task was to create a curriculum that 'ticked the boxes' and was both practical and relevant. Finally, the big ask that I still am grappling was to bring my product to market and scale it up.
Financial Stability In Self-Employment:
Do not be impulsive, use the time you have as a corporate employee to plan and prepare. It could mean that you up-skill yourself, carefully identify & build a squad and do your market research. Finally, plan your finances well. My thumb rule is that you must keep aside monthly cash expenses for up to two years and build some corpus for significant needs. Most entrepreneurs do not fail because their product is bad, they fail because they run out of money and their personal life starts to collapse.
Your Advice To Others:
Answer the following three questions before you start a business 1) What is your core skill and what do you love doing?
2) Can you get so good at doing it that you will stand apart from the crowd?
3) Can you solve a unique problem using your skill and will people pay for it?... Starting a business sounds fancy but be prepared for an incredibly tough ride. There will be times when you will feel very lonely, people may doubt you and you could even start doubting yourself, but if you have spent careful time answering the three questions, then you must remain persistent.