Entrepreneur Ideas Clubsmall business idea for not yet famous entrepreneurs

I talk a lot about the nuts and bolts of starting or buying and running a small business. In my coaching and consulting business, my clients and I work together a lot on streamlining their systems to allow them more personal freedom and increased income. But there is much more to understand.

Through working with them, I’ve noticed that entrepreneurs and small business owners have a different viewpoint. Many small business owners build companies in industries where they were once employees. They often have trouble leaving an employee mindset behind. Entrepreneurs take more risks and think bigger, planning the future sale of their new business in the beginning and starting multiple businesses at once.

The small business owner tends not to work on their business but rather they work in it and get very married to it. The downside is that when the economy gets tight the small business owners often end up in survival mode. For the entrepreneur, the down economy is just another opportunity waiting for them.

Small business owners can change their mindset to model the entrepreneur’s. Creating a vision of what you want your entire life to look like, and how your business supports that, is a key step. Really generate the details of this future life and then write down that detailed picture. Ask yourself questions as you go. What does your day look like? What income are you generating? Do you want more time versus more money? How would you spend that time. Don’t try to figure out the details. Just write down the dream.

When doing this, many people know, in their gut, what they want but their head gets in the way with practical thoughts. For this exercise, DON’T BE PRACTICAL AND DON’T BE AFRAID. Do you want your one lone bricks and mortar store to be the biggest selling franchise in the world? Write it down and don’t put an end date on when you want to achieve this. Be as impractical as possible. Do you want your business to run itself while you go deep-sea fishing for months out of the year? Write it down. For some business owners, just writing it down where they can see it is a big shift.

When you’ve written a detailed vision of what you want work and life to look like, it is important to feel it. If part of your dream involves a new car, what does the steering wheel feel like in your hands? How does that book you wrote look and feel? Professional athletes do visualization all the time. Tiger visualizes his perfect putt hundreds of times before he actually makes it. They work with coaches to help them with this process. Why shouldn’t this work for you?

Get out of survival thinking and start acknowledging your biggest visions of success. Entrepreneurs dream really big and take chances. Start changing your mindset now and begin thinking like an entrepreneur.

With 30 years of consulting experience, Steven Schlagel offers training and coaching for startups, entrepreneurs and small business owners. Check his site for more articles to increase your success!