I wrote a piece over on the GoDaddy blog with some thoughts on the entrepreneur journey, and I wanted to make sure I captured a few of the key points here as well. (That said, you can hop over there to read the full thing.)
The gist: There are four key steps on the entrepreneurship journey: dreaming about what you want to do, actually getting going and creating the venture based on that idea, growing the venture, and then ongoing management once it’s up and running.
Underpinning all of that are the human factors: staying healthy, connecting with others who are also in the community of entrepreneurs, and sharing some of your energy back to the other folks who are also going down the path.
Visually, it kind of looks like this:
The interesting thing about this entrepreneurship journey framework is that it can be used in three ways:
- As a diagnostic, to determine where you are on the journey (Dream It, Create It, Grow It, or Manage It stage)
- As a benchmark, to determine where you are in comparison to others (your peers and/or competitors)
- As a roadmap, to determine what to do next on on the journey (are you currently in the Dream It stage – then there are particular things you need to do in order to move forward into the Create It stage of the entrepreneurship journey)
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to present this framework at the Cal Poly SBDC incubator, with really positive feedback. (If you want to check out the full entrepreneur journey presentation and slide deck, just click that link.)
For folks who have started their own thing: Does this framework hold for you and does it align with your experience? Would love to hear your feedback!