Except you’ll still have to work full-time, and you’ll pay 6-12% of your income to the franchise owner, and you’ll carry all the risk. I don’t blame anyone for the misconceptions, because a lot of them are perpetrated and enforced by people with a vested interest in making money from bad investments by naïve people.Įntrepreneurship is not slaving away to buy a franchise that puts you into debt and creates the possibility that one day, 3-5 years into the future after working harder than you would at a job, the franchise you own will make enough money to support you as much as you could earn at a job. Instead, I learned through doing, and through my overwhelming desire to escape the life of full-time drudgery that I saw many of my friends going into.Īmong people who work regular jobs, there are a number of misconceptions about those of us who don’t. I think there are some programs that focus on small businesses and Internet businesses now, but when I went to a small state college in 1995, they didn’t offer anything like that.

I’m sorry to confirm the belief that a lot of entrepreneurs have about studying business in college: what I learned was completely irrelevant to any business decisions I’ve made over the past ten years. In my 2 ½ years in college, where I earned degrees in Sociology and Psychology, I also took several business courses. In fact, I dislike most of those tasks and have tried over the years to create opportunities that automate the sales process as much as possible.

I was more drawn to the values of creativity and freedom than to the idea of doing business deals, talking on the phone all the time, and going on sales calls.

Many successful entrepreneurs, if not most, are unconventional thinkers. As I’ve studied and met with other entrepreneurs and small business owners, I’ve learned that this is not an unusual trait among successful people. I call myself a renegade entrepreneur because that’s what I’ve always thought of myself as: someone who creates opportunities and oversees projects, but in a different way than others working in traditional jobs do.

The art of nonconformity