Throughout my career, I’ve know of several people that have been able to make a transition from working in a cube to starting their own companies of which are still running today.
How were these individuals able to accomplish this? Afterall, I’m sure a lot of you out there would love to be able to leave the corporate world and work for yourself one day. In all of the cases I’ve seen, the people that started their own companies were able to do so simply because they had connections. Meaning, they were in tight with other individuals that worked at other companies as managers or directors that were willing to outsource contracts to them. Of course they started small, but one contract led to another and then another, until they were able to actually hire employees and lease office space to actually form a full blown private company. Now of course, if you were to run into either of these guys today, they would have you believe that they made it completely on their own. They didn’t. The business was already there and it was handed to them by one of the members of their inner circle. And one of those members is always glad to give them business because then they know they have a place to go work themselves if they were to ever lose their cushy director or upper management positions. I’ll scratch your back so that you can scratch mine one day in case I need it.
Unfortunately, the rest of us of whom are entrepreneurs do not have these kinds of connections. So how could someone like you or I ever launch a successful operation if we do not belong to any inner circle? Well, there are two ways to do business. You can do business by having contracts granted to you by other companies. So essentially all of your clients are other corporations or companies. Or, you can do business with people and not companies. Doing business by offering a product or a service for people of the general public would be a way for individuals such as you or I to start our own gig. All you would need is a good product or service and a good marketing plan in order to get your operation off the ground. You wouldn’t need any connections or have to depend on anyone to give you any business.
What if you don’t have a product or a service to start your own company with? Another way to start your own operation is to bridge the gap between a product and the consumer. There are many areas where this can be done, and even better yet, you can look for areas where gaps aren’t being filled at all. For example, “internet affiliates” bridge the gap between a product and the online consumer. The affiliate will earn a commission from the sale of a product. They bridge the gap between the consumer and the product by providing windows to that product for the consumer. A website that is indexed high in the search engines with affiliate web links can provide a window for high amounts of relevant traffic that are shopping for that particular item.
So case in point, it is possible to start your own gig without any connections. The hard part is being creative and talented enough to have a product or a service that people would pay money for. The good part is that if you can reach a vast area of the population with your product, you can be more successful or profitable than the other types of businesses that soley rely upon other companies to give them work. So instead of giving up or never trying to succeed because you don’t belong to any inner circle, try creating your own inner circle. This will require for your mindset to change. Stop always looking for other people to network with to become successful and become the person that other people are looking to for connections. You want to have people coming to you instead of having to go to them.