Working for someone else’s business, whatever the size, is an excellent way to develop your confidence and skills as an entrepreneur.
The essence of being an entrepreneur is spotting a gap in the market, which in your business may be a sales or product opportunity or a process improvement and filling it with your (better) product or service.
So do the same at your workplace, as an intrepreneur – look and see what’s not working well and find a solution to it. Or a new business opportunity that's not being exploited. Then figure out how to introduce the idea with minimum disruption and maximum benefit. It’s a great exercise in creativity, strategic thinking, financial analysis, persuasion, people management and implementation. If it works, it will get you noticed and you’ll be offered more responsibility. If it doesn’t there’s always next time!
I worked for Motorola as a product manager, which was essentially shoehorning US developed mobile phones into the European market. Then we got a shock because Nokia and Ericsson introduced some very sexy phones with lovely, intuitive user interfaces. They left us with clunky bricks that went out of fashion overnight. A colleague and I wrote a complete new user interface on bits of paper and flew to the US to show our boss. He loved it and our creation became the new UI for products worldwide.
That was a significant part of my journey in having my own business.
I learned that with some flair and imagination, and a desire to solve problems you can move mountains in even large companies. Just spot the opportunity and go for it.
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