As I am preparing for my children’s WET Halloween adventures I can’t help but think about how fear haunts entrepreneurs every day. I am pretty sure these fears hang over us like the dark scary night. Do you find yourself waking up in the middle of night wondering how you will pay your staff or land the next big sale?

One of my biggest fears is how to keep my services and events fresh.  I also want to keep my sponsors engaged and interested in working with me year after year. It is not easy and I work really hard to keep everyone interested and engaged in what we do.

I also fear growing too fast and not growing fast enough! It is always a constant balancing act to know when to expand into new markets. Some expansions are really easy and others prove extremely challenging. I am not a witch with special powers to predict the future so every move is a gamble that I can’t predict.

One thing I do know is that being prepared and not in a rush is a key to success. Here’s what I have learned:

  1. Research and survey & test the scary unknown waters:  Please learn from me – don’t be in such a hurry that you don’t carefully plan your next move. Look at the success of others in that market. Survey your market in advance. Spend time building relationships within that market first so it is easier to get help as you break in.
  2. Learn from your evil mistakes: Okay, let’s face it mistakes are embarrassing and hurt in many ways but I find successful entrepreneurs always learn from there mistakes and often don’t repeat the same mistakes twice. So stop beating yourself up – move on and be smart to take stock of how you can be better next time.
  3. Communicate well with your friends, spouse and children: Scarier then a spider is green monster of GUILT. We often feel some serious guilt over not spending enough time with friends and family. We feel misunderstood, and like a bad horror movie we feel like we are on a stretching machine being pulled in two painful directions. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact in can be the opposite. Entrepreneurs have the luxury of setting their own schedules. You can plan a special lunch with a working spouse or volunteer to talk about being your own boss in your child’s class. I will let you in on a little secret I have never mentioned publicly: my father business resulted in bankruptcy . I worked within his business, a resort during my teen life – it was one of the hardest and also most exciting parts of my life.  Unfortunately I didn’t become an entrepreneur during his lifetime – he died 5 years ago – but I know that his dreams also inspired me – even if they didn’t work out the way he or I would have thought. Did he learn stuff from the experience? I am pretty sure he did.  I know I did.