Are You Passionate Enough — Day 12 of 365 Leadership Blogging

The thing that separates the talkers from the believers, is action.

This bold statement is wrapped with issues about people who talk a good game but don’t actually start their business. Or people who stumble at the first hurdle of starting a business and never get back on the horse.

Often we come across people who are passionate about starting a business or want to pursue their side hustle on a full-time basis.

Having passion is great but having the right information and guidance can be the difference between success and failure.

A few rounds with a good business coach will help any budding business owner see clearly through the clouds. We typically offer potential clients a session — 15 minutes of questions on their current or new business model and 15 minutes of advice and feedback. This helps all parties determine the temperature before committing to a working relationship. It also helps us to understand the listening style, thinking, communication and passion of a person.

We have, however, learnt to accept that starting a business isn’t for everyone and aim to stay attuned to the signals that the best advice we can offer is to grow a career. It isn’t often we resort to this as we wholeheartedly believe that everyone has a great venture inside of them and we always aim to help people manifest their vision. But our passion isn’t always enough.

We have both spent most of our adult working life in a corporate environment so for some time the thought of starting a business was very alien, especially to me. Vanessa was the brave heart who stepped out into the unknown and declared she was off to do consulting. I still remember the discussion we had on the weekend before to plan out the timing of when and how we both could step out into business. The very next day I received a joyful call saying she had quit her job. Her feeling of jubilation was contagious so I quit my job 6 months later. Corporate life isn’t for everybody.

This is why we have such a great connection with people on the brink of starting a business. We’ve been there several times and have the success and fail t-shirts to prove it. One of the hardest lessons we learned was determining what was a hobby and what was a potential business. Our own personal interests can end up blinding us from objectivity and working on a viable business.

Having a passion for something doesn’t mean you should start a business thinking you will be the next Richard Branson. It simply doses work like that. Starting a business is a bit like launching a rocket, you will need every ounce of time, energy, resource, expertise, to get the rocket off the ground. Then you need to make sure there is enough fuel to carry you to your destination.