Following the Way of the Entrepreneur

The reading level for this article is Novice

It was late at night. Outside it was raining. I was sitting at my computer looking for new business ideas as I so often am. In the background I was listening to ‘The Art of Profitability’ on my iPod, a purchase that I had made to increase the amount of reading that I could accomplish. It had worked too. Almost all the time that I had normally spent staring into space on the train or the bus was now spent learning every thing I could about business. It is a great book and I was trying to absorb as many of the ideas presented in it as possible.

Over the last 2 years I had learned a lot. I learned how to build a website, value a business and analyze a public company. I had learned to look at real estate from a business point of view. I had learned about tax law and how to form companies. I had learned all this and so much more&ldots; I had even started nitronworks.com – a website to track my progress in business and to help other young people start down the path of the entrepreneur. It was my baby and I was proud of it as well as all the work that I had put and was still putting in to it. As I looked back on how far I had come in such a short space of time, I knew that even though I had learned so much there was one thing that I still had not done.

I had not yet built a real business,

Sitting in front of my 5-year-old iMac I knew that this was the goal that I had to accomplish. My situation was not an easy one. I am a 17-year-old British student living in Sweden, about to enter my final year of high school after which I’m off to university. When I move to England I know that I will be fully self-sufficient. I have what some would consider as extreme views about the British education system and I don’t want to be supported by anyone to help fund my education whether it is the government, or my parents. That means the time frame for setting up my business is just over a year.

Mission set.

After looking back on what I had learned about online business in the last two years I decided to create a drop-ship business. Being a fastidious reader of zeromillion.com I have decided I’m going to follow the zeromillion marketing and Internet business model to the letter. That means that at the beginning I will have little inventory, few employees, and minimum fixed costs. It means that I will have to do things that normally a 17-year-old kid would not be allowed to do, such as getting hold of and using a credit card. This problem has stopped me before, giving me doubts sending uncertainty through me. But this time I’m not going to let something as small and as trivial as this stop me on my path.

So here I am about to embark on the first true business venture of my life, and I know that even if it doesn’t work out how I want it to I will learn a lot and my next company will be bigger and better then the last and I know that I will continue in this mould for a large part of my life. For such has always and will always be the way of the true entrepreneur.