Looking back, what's do you wish you understood about entrepreneurship before you ever got started?

How much bad information you have to go through to get to the truth.

Of course, I did have a dictionary, which told me this:

en·tre·pre·neur·ship
ˌ
noun
the activity of setting up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.
"the new business opportunities have encouraged entrepreneurship on a grand scale"

So, the direct answer is I wish I would have really UNDERSTOOD every part of the definition. Let's help others:

The ACTIVITY. You have to DO something.

SETTING UP A BUSINESS. In order to set one up, you need to know what a business is, and all the moving parts. A business engages in COMMERCE, it is what separates it from a not for profit or a charity.

Commerce is a dealing between entities, with an exchange of value. So a business could exchange value with anything included in "entity"...which is a thing with distinct and independent existence. Governments, corporations, not for profits, groups, and individuals.

Value is an agreement. An agreement between the entities doing commerce.

A part of the set up is knowing your responsibilities and regulations, from city, county, state and federal or whatever you have. It is planning for TAXES, which means BOOKKEEPING. So legal, financial and regulatory DUE DILIGENCE happens before you begin a BUSINESS. Although, in the case of a sole proprietor, a guy selling potato peelers on the street, maybe he only needs a permit (gov't ok).

So all of this is in the process of setting up the business and PLANNING FOR IT.

Lost 99 % of Warriors on that part, now most of the ones left, it is

TAKING ON FINANCIAL RISKS in the hope of profit.

Probably a million posts asking about FREE this or that here, very little about taking on the risk.

If more people knew what it meant when I was starting out, I would have or could have accelerated my growth and focused on more profitable ideas.

I see these posts as being useless, but that's just me. But, if anyone, ANYONE made a list from this, and put bullet points under each section, they would have a virtual business plan.

And since the ACTIVITY OF SETTING UP A BUSINESS includes identifying customers, that would seem to be the most logical and quickest place to start.

Begin your Entrepreneurial Journey with locating BUYERS, your customers first, then organize your efforts around them.

That is what I wish I would have done, it would have saved a lot of time.

That it takes money to make money.

Good question. Well there are 2 things (mistakes I made) I did not understand when I started my first business and in some ways I became a victim of my own success.

When I started my first business I was making pretty decent money, sometimes up to $1500 a day and I had way more clients than I could handle.

First mistake, the business needed me to operate it fully. I could get help but I could not walk away and let it run itself. Now I understand that there will only be so far you will ever go when you run a business that way.

Second mistake, I relied on one platform only for my leads. At the time I did not know it but that meant I did not have a business.

While I was busy and making money I should have branched out from that platform and I didn't. Then they changed the rules and some other things and the money stopped coming in overnight. That was a big wake up call for me as I lost everything in one swoop.

So what I understand now are the golden rules.

You must be able to walk away from a business and the business should still be able to operate without you, even if you have to outsource or hire someone.

Also, that you cannot rely on one source for your income or leads, you constantly need to be one step ahead and have a back up, and another back up and another.

Don't get lost in your success as that is a recipe for disaster.

If you're only making $2,000/month and that's enough to pay your bills and make you happy and free in life.... then you dont need to follow gurus and try to make $30,000/month. Don't let others define your success for you.

And how expensive or painful finding out the information was bad could be.

Beyond that,

Never confuse genius with dumb luck.

I wished I understood exactly how much 'exposure' would be needed to sell (1) product alone. This way I wouldn't have half assed my income producing activities in my first couple of years.

That if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

That doing too many things at a time is equal to doing nothing. Need to have a specific goal in mind.

1. That I can't do everything on my own. I should be afraid of hiring extra hands, whether it's inhouse staff or a Filipino or any other Asian/European VA from overseas. In the beginning, I was a bit paranoid, afraid that if I let someone else do part of the work, they wouldn't understand what needed to be done as well as I would--even though I lacked the skill. Suffice to say, it wasn't long before the burdens I stubbornly placed on myself brought me down.

2. I have to spend money if I want to earn more. Don't expect revenue to increase if you don't invest in improving your business, whether it's the tools you use or the place where you're working.