Many people have pointed out to me that being an entrepreneur was once frowned upon. Sayings such as ‘fly by nighters’ and ‘con artists’ are often associated with the ‘entrepreneur’ of yesteryear. These days however, the proposition of being an entrepreneur has become a whole lot more attractive. After all you call the shots. You have an unlimited earnings potential. You can work from anywhere (provided you establish your business in the cloud). You can work around the kids. You can do what you want, how you want and when you want. And it is indeed all those things. And I love it.

But it can also be a lonely existence. And a whole lot of late nights and hard work.
You need to come up with ideas, get them off the ground with next to no money, and perform every function of the business until your business is at a level where you have the benefit of starting to either sub-contract or hire people to assist you with the tasks you least like and don’t have the skills to perform and drive your business forward.

You can be creative about how you get help in the beginning. I did. I used interns from the local university, placed a page on our website saying that we accepted work experience students, and got friends and family to help out too. There is of course outsourcing tasks overseas using one of the many freelancing sites.

But it’s a process and it doesn’t all happen overnight like some people would have you believe.
You need to market like crazy, solve problems, be flexible, innovate, play on your strengths, outsource your weaknesses. It’s a game and it’s a journey, not a destination. But hey, so is life.

It would take a long time to change a culture of going to University and going out and getting a job to leaving school and starting your own business. But I do think it’s possible and I do think fostering entrepreneurialism at school level would make a dramatic impact on our economy.

Just imagine if we had a population of people who could think for themselves, solve problems, innovate, create something from nothing and generate more income to support the ageing population which will only become more of a problem as time goes on. Industries are changing at such a rate, in many ways our schooling system is pretty flawed.

By the time we create a curriculum to teach something, it’s probably already out of date information. The jobs we are preparing our children for won’t necessarily be there when they are ready to work. So let’s rethink the whole approach. And encourage our kids to become entrepreneurs instead.