Solve the Job Problem as an Entrepreneur

Good Thursday morning to you, as we are over the hump and headed towards the end of our week in the theme of solving problems. I wanted to bring out the other area that I work on in coaching. This kind of relates to what we talked about at the beginning of the week. I work by helping people move through the issues of starting over and making the changes to find success this time. Sometimes I have clients who are starting over for a second time, learning to be an entrepreneur again. I firmly believe that relearning our entrepreneurial skills – something this country was built on – is a key to our success.

It was 1992 when I was hospitalized after having a seizure. I was told to find another way to make a living. I tried to get work in many areas that I had experience and places I did not. The biggest thing I found to be a problem was that I couldn’t live on the pay that was offered to me when I was offered jobs. The places that offered a pay that I could live on would not or could not hire someone who had two particular things that I now had in my life history, even though I had the skills needed:

First, I now had a form of epilepsy that was not under control so if the job had risks (and all the high-paying jobs I was qualified to do included risky environments) they could not hire me for insurance reasons. Secondly, I recently had a worker’s comp claim for being injured on the job – it was that injury that led to the onset of my epilepsy. Those two things combined made me a hazard to work in places where my skills were.

I had to learn to recreate my world. Thus I got a crash course in being an entrepreneur. When I started to learn how to think to make a living to support myself, it also gave me the wisdom to work on making other things work better in my life. When I was young, each time I worked at a job that may not have been the greatest, I was able to make the job better for myself, but I was also able find ways to make the company more efficient and provide a better product.

A few years later I had gotten back into car cleaning and worked in an auto body shop. It was there that I met the makers of a new car polish that worked to clean and polish cars that were freshly painted.  I worked hard to educate myself on their product and I found some new, more efficient ways to use it. As a result I was able to get side work helping them demonstrate their products at trade shows and to local shops.

Well now I am a coach. I also work with a few other people going into companies and running small two- and three-hour workshops to help teach employees to think like an entrepreneur. This is good in a couple of ways.

First it helps the company by giving it creative workers who are then able to find ways to help the company have new ideas, or maybe even better and more efficient ways to get things done. So many smaller companies are having a hard time finding ways to stay competitive in today’s tough times. So we help them by bringing out entrepreneurial ideas in their workers so they can make companies better and stronger. Also, we help the employee think like the business owner; in some cases they create side projects in their homes, a business that could create a better lifestyle for their family. Who knows? If they grow that business out of a spare bedroom at home, or maybe even a garage at their house, it could replace their full-time job, or a larger company may see the greatness of the project they are working on and offer to buy them so the bigger company’s resources can be used to expand the idea to a larger market.

An example of these ideas would be the guys who created the Clover brewing system that Starbucks uses in some stores. It was the love of making a great cup of coffee that led a man to put together a team and build them in his home shop. Starbucks was able to make a deal with his team to take his product to use in their stores. We all know the story of how FaceBook was created in a college dorm room. Apple computers began in a garage. Let’s face it: people who think about becoming an entrepreneur with an idea outside the regular job are the ones who are going to make major changes to our world.

I have believed for years that those small idea people, the one people spending time creating a better world with an idea that some person told them they could not do are who gives us great things in this world. Some of those people who are taking to entrepreneurial lifestyles start out with things like selling Mary Kay, Amway, Avon. They wanted a better life, and the only jobs they could get with the skills they have could not pay to keep food on the table. So in desperation they started doing something else to supplement.

Aside from these entrepreneurial workshops, I also offer personal one-on-one coaching, as well as group think tank coaching to help people develop entrepreneurial ideas to change their world. So if my story today has prompted you to think, “I need to start thinking like an entrepreneur,” then it’s time for you hire a coach. If your company is at a stale point, it may be time to schedule one of our RockStar entrepreneur workshops. Either way, it’s time to change our world, this is the solution to the problem.

I’m Tim Gillette, the Rocker Life Coach. It’s time for you to live the life you always wanted, to learn to love what you do and those you share this life with. Start today and become a RockStar in your world.