Businesses don’t run on autopilot, at least at the initial stages. A lot of work has to go into it.
I always find it amusing when wantre-preneurs (that class of people who want to start an enterprise, but are still joking), talk about starting a business somewhere, employ people to run it while they go face other things…. Like partying around the world, or even running a “bigger” business elsewhere.
Here’s the thing: you cannot start a business and not nurture it personally in the initial stages. A new business will always need direct input of whoever is founding it.
Can you imagine a woman giving birth to a child and then delegate the feeding and nurturing of the baby to “some managers”? Probably not.
Employees, (the usual ones) do not stay up at night, thinking about how to improve the business or how to beat the competition.
It is the Founders that carry that kind of burden.
Someone brilliantly concluded that part of the reason Yahoo! collapsed was because their founders were too nice, they failed to toughen up and make “alpha bets” that would position their company for multi-decade relevance.
Overtime, when you have established the business well, you can “wean” the business from your day-to-day burden. At the very least, starting a business would require up to 18 – 24months of your undivided attention. From pre-planning phase to growth phase, after which you can delegate to managers and you can be sure the business will continue to boom.
Seasoned entrepreneurs are not necessarily bound do things this way, A Aliko Dangote or Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos can today start any kind of business they want and not need to run it day-to-day because they have developed a certain capacity to handle anything in all their years of work.
So, unless you are a seasoned entrepreneur, it might be helpful to listen to me:
You can start a side business, but never assume the business will run itself, never assume your managers will run it effectively for you and please never for a moment think that the business will run without your involvement in the early stages.
