There are so many bright sides of entrepreneurship that people tend to forget the dark sides of an entrepreneurial life. Before you quit your job for the startup of your dreams, there are many things that you must learn about including the dark side of entrepreneurship.
It’s good to weigh the risks always before jumping in for the objective. Definitely business growth, money, financial freedom, fame, power and a lavish life are the lure on the other side, which tells you to embrace this life, and start your own business, but do you know what many entrepreneurs have lost for all that, and yet could not get that dream life which everyone dreams of.
Too many articles just focus on the bright aspects of chasing an entrepreneurial life.
We believe it is important if potential entrepreneurs have a more balanced picture of what they are actually going to experience once they go after an entrepreneurial dream.
So here are the most important dark aspects of entrepreneurship:
You will probably have work-life imbalance
One of the biggest struggles of entrepreneurs is the lack of work-life balance. This starts with taking more pressure and responsibilities.
As you start taking more workload, you start working until the late hours. Once you start working more, to accommodate more time of yours into the working time, you either get up too early or sleep late.
As you get into using more time of the day working, you sleep less. Gradually, your eating cycles are also affected and pushed late.
Other health complications start building up with common ones like stress, anxiety, palpitations, coronary heart problems, back ache, high pressure, etc.
In addition, you cannot keep up with the social life, and often miss commitments and gradually also understand the bitter fact that it gets more and more difficult for you to commit for a social gathering party, family outing, day out, picnic, sitting together, camping, fishing and holidays.
You get irritated quickly and, due to the sleep deprivation and poor eating and resting habits, you develop other problems that keep you short-tempered. Your relationships turn sour for your over-indulgence in work, and your delicate relations break, while family life gets too complicated.
Suggestion to fix this issue: Entrepreneurs need to carefully manage their time and provide space for social and personal aspects of their lives. This way, they are able to mitigate the work-life imbalance issue and sustain a healthier happier life.
You could actually end up with a lower income compared to your employee peers
A very serious and usually unseen issue of entrepreneurship is that entrepreneurs, on average, earn less compared to employees.
This dark side of entrepreneurship might sound surprising and counter-intuitive but given that only a small group of entrepreneurs succeed and make it big, the majority struggle with surviving. Of course, you do everything to be part of the small group, but there is no guarantee.
Entrepreneurs take a risk as they have no fixed salary every month. Without being too negative, they may face obstacles in getting customers or in making them pay on time. And most don’t know about all aspects of regulations and administrative work.
Now, this may not bother you initially. But in a few months, as you feel that you have no funds to get entertained, buy items of your fascination, and even are falling short to pay bills in some months, then you get tensed and frustrated. This would not have been the case if you were on a salary just like your employees are.
Suggestion to fix this issue: While this may sound much too risky, the beauty of entrepreneurship is that you have the prospect of being successful and growing your income. This hope keeps entrepreneurs trying hard and making use of their full potential.
You may face some difficulties getting re-employed in the future
As the frustration due to excessive workload, imbalance in work life, low income, etc. starts to build up; you may now think of getting back to your salaried job again. But another dark side of entrepreneurship might kick in: it might too late to get back to a salaried job.
The gap created in your working profile, which would reflect on your bio-data or CV, would make it difficult for you to go to the job market, thus reducing your chances to land a job.
Companies may argue with you on your reliability on this ground that, once your business starts running well you may leave the job.
In addition, entrepreneurship sends a negative signal to employers regarding whether you are willing to cooperate with managers or whether you fit an organizational culture.
You may not be an “organization man” if you have been self-employed so this might work against you, once you try to be re-employed.
This is yet another challenge for entrepreneurs, as chances of getting re-employed gets narrow.
Suggestion to fix this issue: So many companies these days are looking for corporate entrepreneurs (or intrapreneurs) fortunately these days. These are people who are creative and have great ideas and would like to build these ideas within firm boundaries. You can position yourself here and use the entrepreneurship experience to your advantage by claiming your expertise on how to develop an idea, build a product, build traction, etc.
You may face a higher failure likelihood than expected
Another dark side of entrepreneurship is coming from the failure risks. It would feel so good if after taking all these troubles and risks, the startup runs well and becomes a success. But sadly not all stories have a good ending.
The reality is that more than 90% of the startups fail in some stages of their activity (mostly in very early stage), and only less than 10% succeeds. There are many reasons behind it, but to make your startup a success you may have to take many risks and go through innumerable challenges.
This is one of the dark aspects of entrepreneurship that people rarely talk about. So if you are planning to invest your time and effort for the next few years on something that might fail, think twice. If the venture fails even after that, you may get all the more depressed.
Suggestion to fix this issue: follow our suggestions in this website to increase your chances of success. For example, this and this post can help you to secure angel investment or venture capital which are important to attract much-needed resources for your startup.
Final words: Dark side of entrepreneurship can be dealt with
Every man looks back at things when he sits for some time with himself. But for an entrepreneur who has experienced the bitterness of failure and wrestled with the dark side of entrepreneurship for some time, this kind of journey through the memory lane can be quite a painful job.
That’s because, ‘hows’ and ‘whys,’ and ‘why me’ like questions will continue to bother you and haunt you, whenever you would look back at the decisions you took to choose this life.
If you are not lucky, then decisions taken by you once with a positive mind may later be the reason or your repentance for life.
On the other hand, you want to have as few regrets in life as possible. So if you always dreamed of starting something, it is better to fail than to have the regret of not starting at all for the rest of your life.
Hence it’s good to choose an entrepreneurial life after thinking much on the pros and cons of this, and not just the pros before jumping into the challenge.
