If you’re an entrepreneur who comes from a corporate background, and you want to improve your business, or if you’re planning to take the leap and want to start out on the right foot, here’s your chance to learn from the experiences (and mistakes!) of others just like you. It’s the Corporate Entrepreneurs Unplugged TeleSummit, taking place Tuesdays and Thursdays, February 10 - March 19, 10 am PST/1 pm EST.

It’s being thrown by Sherri Garrity and Marcia Hoeck, and they’ve got a fabulous roster lined up, including: Pamela Slim, Michael Gerber, Naomi Dunford, Michael Port, Marie Forleo, James Roche, Gina & Stephen Bell, Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, Melanie Benson Strick and Alicia Forest.

I joined the preview call they held earlier today, and what follows are my notes from the call!

Sherri and Marcia met at Ali Brown’s OSBW, and had an instant connection. They have similar businesses - corporate communications and marketing. Complementary specialties - change management, team building.

They say there’s a difference between lifelong entrepreneurs and peeps who escape corporate for the entrepreneurial lifestyle…and a complete mindshift that needs to happen in that latter set. Especially when it can seem like you escape the corporate world just to create another “job” for yourself. And coming straight out of academia to entrepreneurship creates its own set of issues.

The series is designed to provide positive role models of people who have left corporate and succeeded, and/or serve corporate escapees and do so with a business that doesn’t also work them to death.

Top three reasons why people leave their corporate positions:

• Control - because you have little or no control in a corporate position…
• Security - corporate provides a false sense of security…
• Money - there’s a cap on what you make in a corporate position, and none on your own business!

And here, the main focus of the preview call, are the seven biggest mistakes corporate people make when starting/working their own businesses.

1. Thinking that being good at what you do is the basis for a business. You have to have a market, and people looking for what you have to offer - who can pay for it! - before you can make a go of it. “Starving customers,” as James Roche put it once.

2. Thinking that you can do it all by yourself. You come out of corporate and think you want to ditch everyone, keep it simple, go it alone. And what happens is you plateua in your energy, your lifestyle, and your income, because you can’t leverage your specific abilities. You can have employees, a virtual team, contract for services…there’s more than one way to compound the math of the productivity.

3.Thinking that you can keep yourself on track. You’re so used to the structure of your organization that it feels like you’re throwing off the shackles. And while it can be thrilling to be free of that, it can also be difficult to know what to focus on, and support yourself when you’re the boss and have no pre-ordained structure to rely upon. Mastermind groups help here, too!

4. Thinking that you need to get people’s approval. Nothing is further from the truth. As an entrepreneur, nobody’s there to push you, to tell you what’s right or wrong. It can be very liberating or very lonely, or both at different times! Sometimes there’s an adjustment period to getting stuff OUT THERE without five levels of approval, and the stakes are higher when you represent yourself instead of someone else’s company. Also, even with a team, no one cares as passionately about it as you do. And friends and family aren’t the people to rely upon for advice necessarily, so you have to learn to trust yourself and put a good support system in place.

5. Not continuing to learn. In corporate, all you have to do is your job. If you need education for your job, the company sets it up, and you just show up. When you’re on your own, it’s easy to get caught up working in your business and not on it. You don’t break out of their routines to learn something new, and that’s true of successful AND not-so-successful businesses. And then you find yourself falling behind. Instead, you need to work on your business and yourself - and not just in your field. It’s also learning about marketing, leadership, self-improvement, you name it! In a survey of 200 Chief Marketing Officers, 6 of the top 10 things they’re looking for in new hires relates to knowledge of Web 2.0 and community-building strategies.

6. Not knowing what you really want. Especially if you do in your business what you did in your corporate career. If you don’t, you end up doing things that work well for other industries, or other business models, and it’s not on a path that YOU want to be on. The guests of this series saw their success take off when they tapped in to what they really wanted, found something that aligned with what their market wanted, and found a way to leverage it beyond working 1-on-1. Eight of the 10 interviewees in this unplugged series are women with kids at home, and four of them have kids under five years old.

7. Thinking it has to be “perfect.” Get out and try it, even if it isn’t “perfect” yet. You’ve got to move quickly and get things started, and that’s a better way anyway. The longer you wait, the more you worry, the more you second-guess, the more you let fear in and let fear breed even more fear. “It’s easier to direct the troops once they start moving.” –General Norman Schwartzkopf. The Zigzag Principle: Success never takes a straight line. - -James Roche. Jack Canfield gives the example of driving at night - you can only see a couple hundred yards ahead of you at any time with your headlights, but you can drive all the way across the country that way.

Please consider checking out this great event - it looks like it’ll be incredible, and Sherri and Marcia are donating a portion of the proceeds to Kiva.org, the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. Their work, though international, is similar in mission to a group we’re members of, MicroCredit-NH. So we can totally get behind it. We’ve already signed up for the Telesummit, and hope you will, too!

Posted in Call in the Coach, Dances With Gurus, Entrepreneur Diaries, Microenterprises R Us |

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