There comes a time in one’s ca­reer that change, some­times dis­rup­tive change, can set in. You could face job-loss due to cost cut­ting.

You might be re­con­sid­er­ing your op­tions out­side of be­ing an em­ploy­ee.

Or you might have a per­cep­tion that change is com­ing to the or­gan­i­sa­tion and this might not fit in­to your ca­reer plans.

Many ca­reer pro­fes­sion­als of­ten con­sid­er the en­tre­pre­neur­ship op­tion as one that can of­fer sig­nif­i­cant op­por­tu­ni­ties.

You or a good bud­dy at work could be toy­ing around with an idea that your em­ploy­er may find not ex­cit­ing.

You could be sit­ting on a very big op­por­tu­ni­ty and it just does not fit in­to the long-term plans of your cur­rent em­ploy­er.

The founders of Home De­pot in the US, Bernie Mar­cus and Arthur Blank were fired at Handy Dan, a home im­prove­ment store, when they were told that they were not need­ed af­ter a dis­agree­ment with their boss. Their idea was to start a ware­house type home im­prove­ment busi­ness.

To­day, Home De­pot is worth over US$200 bil­lion and each of its founders are mul­ti-bil­lion­aires.

Em­ploy­ee mind­set

It is not an easy tran­si­tion; to move from one mind­set to an­oth­er. Mind­set is how you think and act. You are wired to be­have in a cer­tain way. Chang­ing that wiring is like you’re hir­ing your­self to change the elec­tri­cal wiring in your house.

How do non-own­ers think?

Em­ploy­ees like to take or­ders, many times do not take ini­tia­tive, fail to be cre­ative prob­lem solvers and lack an ap­pre­ci­a­tion of emerg­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties. Why?

It’s all about tak­ing risks. The typ­i­cal em­ploy­ee is rarely re­ward­ed to take risks, so why take it?

Of­ten the boss does the think­ing and when he doesn’t, you must get per­mis­sion to think and hope­ful­ly he will not be of­fend­ed.

Then there is the com­pa­ny pol­i­tics; peo­ple look at how they can ben­e­fit from an idea first, then the firm. They want to im­prove their stand­ing and move up the or­gan­i­sa­tion­al chart.

This could mean ideas with­out com­mer­cial po­ten­tial mov­ing for­ward. Or they might come up with the idea and may not get the ben­e­fit.

Large or­gan­i­sa­tions once start­ed as small­er ver­sions that were en­tre­pre­neur­ial. That made them grow faster, but as they grew, they added more struc­ture and for­mal­i­ty. When this hap­pens, the en­tre­pre­neur­ial spir­it of the founder gets di­min­ished. If he is still at the head, he is some­times frus­trat­ed why the pace is so slow.

Man­agers are hired, and they are fre­quent­ly not en­tre­pre­neuri­al­ly mind­ed.

They just kill any new ini­tia­tive that might dis­rupt the sta­tus quo.

Even the of­fice de­sign can be a cre­ative and in­no­va­tion killer. Cu­bi­cle life, as I like to call it, is just good for rou­tine work, but does not get you to think out­side of the cu­bi­cle.

Since a com­pa­ny’s gas is its think­ing, the gas tank in a bu­reau­crat­ic firm will get small­er and small­er as it gets larg­er.

Mind­set change

Our brains have cer­tain pref­er­ences. We like the thrill we get from do­ing things we love. If cook­ing is your thing, then you will con­tin­ue to ex­per­i­ment with new ways and keep talk­ing about it at work.

This prac­tice can lead to de­vel­op­ing a com­pe­tence in the culi­nary arts.

But if you were asked to do some­thing you dis­like, say learn Span­ish, you might avoid learn­ing it and so de­vel­op lit­tle com­pe­tence.

We like our com­fort zone.

We all have com­fort zones, and this keeps us from see­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties. Get­ting out of the com­fort zone re­quires a lot of mo­ti­va­tion.

Leav­ing a job is leav­ing the com­fort zone, de­spite that you are go­ing nowhere ca­reer wise. The safe­ty net of a cushy ca­reer is hard to aban­don. But not for some.

Den­nis Ramdeen, founder of Pep­per Ad­ver­tis­ing, was quot­ed in the Glob­al En­tre­pre­neur­ship Mon­i­tor (2010) on Trinidad and To­ba­go: “My de­ci­sion to start a bou­tique ad agency, Pep­per, came from my in­ca­pac­i­ty to tow the line and fol­low cor­po­rate in­struc­tions that did not sit well with my val­ue sys­tem, my train­ing and ex­pe­ri­ence.”

Chang­ing your mind­set re­quires that you per­form dif­fer­ent things. Learn­ing a new lan­guage, tak­ing a dif­fer­ent route (even though it is not short­er), us­ing the oth­er hand, can de­vel­op new brain con­nec­tions; more path­ways to use to solve prob­lems and spot op­por­tu­ni­ties.

It’s like you have one route to Point Fortin, but if you build a new high­way (new brain net­works), there is an ad­di­tion­al way to get there faster.

Your com­pe­ten­cies

You may have built up a huge bank of skills. Some you can throw away and some might be quite valu­able.

I am some­times sur­prised to know that some pro­fes­sion­als do not know how to mon­e­tise their com­pe­tences. Though some em­ploy­ees might be good at this, oth­ers maybe sit­ting on a gold mine (or gold mind).

Some take to op­por­tu­ni­ty quick­er. Sales and mar­ket­ing peo­ple are trained to go af­ter cus­tomers and close sales.

Ac­coun­tants are not trained to do so, add lawyers, en­gi­neers, doc­tors, den­tists, and you get the mes­sage.

Mar­ket­ing staff can make the en­tre­pre­neur­ial tran­si­tion faster. No­tice when some of your col­leagues in your com­pa­ny leave to start a busi­ness, who are the first ones to do so? You guessed, it was peo­ple who worked in sales and mar­ket­ing.

En­tre­pre­neur mind­set

What kind of mind do en­tre­pre­neurs have? We know they thrive in un­cer­tain­ty; the fog of war is where the ac­tion is for them.

This un­cer­tain­ty gives rise to risks and en­tre­pre­neurs know risks could be mask­ing a hid­den op­por­tu­ni­ty.

Man­agers when they do take risks, they do it with the com­pa­ny’s re­sources, the on­ly risk is their job.

This makes the tran­si­tion more dif­fi­cult as risk averse per­sons fear the loss of cap­i­tal and not to men­tion the so­cial risks of fail­ing. In our so­ci­ety, when you “buss” a busi­ness, it’s taboo. It is one of the most shame­ful of busi­ness deeds.

Busi­ness­es that do well al­so are those that fo­cus on in­no­va­tion.

En­tre­pre­neurs not on­ly in­no­vate but cre­ate in­no­va­tion that de­liv­ers val­ue. In­no­va­tion can be in a prod­uct or ser­vice, like the new iPhone but it can be in process.

If an en­tre­pre­neur finds a way to pro­duce dou­bles in a fac­to­ry op­er­a­tion (mass pro­duced), then we can have our num­ber one street food at a low­er price and with an ex­tra guar­an­tee that it meets strict health stan­dards.

Su­jan Pa­tel writ­ing on en­tre­pre­neur.com of­fers some ad­di­tion­al ad­vice to em­ploy­ees who want to tran­si­tion.

First, de­ter­mine what you like to do and what peo­ple will pay for.

Then, start your busi­ness on a small scale and test for cus­tomer feed­back. Af­ter that you can hire a team and se­cure your fi­nanc­ing.

Re­mem­ber, man­ag­ing a start­up is quite dif­fer­ent from a ma­ture com­pa­ny.

In an ear­ly stage ven­ture things are fuzzy and cus­tomer ac­qui­si­tion is para­mount. Some­times your new prod­uct maybe not take off im­me­di­ate­ly, and you have few­er mar­ket­ing re­sources to pro­mote it, and this makes it chal­leng­ing.

You will have to be­come the firm’s first sales per­son.

If you are a tech­ni­cal per­son this is dif­fi­cult to do, but a nec­es­sary skill.

Saj­jad Hamid MBA ACF­BA

(fam­i­ly busi­ness) is an SME and fam­i­ly busi­ness ad­vis­er.

He can be con­tact­ed via: en­tre­pre­neurt­nt@gmail.com

www.en­tre­pre­neurt­nt.com

SKYPE saj­jad.hamid9

www.linkedin.com/in/saj­jad­hamid