One piece of advice you hear everywhere, from everyone, even from those who have never been entrepreneurs in their lives, is: make yourself visible. ‘Of course’ – you answer, although, when you hear these you have already been flooded by attention…
Attention of those who are about to convince you that you have to list yourself in several platforms, in order to be visible for possible customers making queries of your basic credentials. Of course, you are required to pay a small (in real, a considerable) amount, despite of the fact that the data is anyway presented in the official journal, by default. Do not spend too much time with trying to figure out what your benefit may be, because it is not about your benefit, but of those who are determined to sell such public data for others, who may make queries about you. What an idea…. Do not worry, if you are smart enough not to walk into this trap, your data will be available in several platforms, anyway…
You receive attention also from different sales people, who are about to build your website, optimize for SEO, restructure your IT infrastructure, such as to provide you with insights, mailing lists, etc., some cases followed by a LinkedIn message in a personal tone, pretending to be a meaningful contact. Similar to that other thousand sent out to your fellow entrepreneurs. You can also experience aggressive approaches where refusing to join certain ‘communities’ you are said to be ‘left out’ from certain circles… What a loss, you may think, if they have to pressurize people with such notices…
You are most probably hesitant first, as you hear many failures of otherwise talented people, and that much advice about the utmost importance of being open, a listener, changing your mindset, your habits, your whatsoever, in order to be successful. Not to mention to book a coach. Or two. One for your professional life and another for your personal life. Even online. Well…
You start then reading articles, posts and selected news related to your profession, your prospective and targeted customers, in order to become up-to-date, to follow the ongoing public discussions, and to participate when time has come.
Unfortunately, what would most probably happen is that you become even more frustrated… You may think that you are a bit out of the stream due to your sabbatical, are incompetent in certain fields although you thought you had a reasonable amount of experience, or somehow ‘not enough’ to be out there among the other entrepreneurs in kind…
At this point, you go home, are completely down, stare at the TV and open a bottle of wine to relax. You want to think this whole idea over again. You realize that wine may not be enough to solve this problem and you switch to something stronger. Okay, you may also switch to your pajamas and hold your favorite pillow…
How could it be that you have never heard of such things before? How could you live such an isolated life from the ‘real world’? How could you get here, at all? After the first drink you realize that it may not be without reasons that you had no idea about those things you just discovered. You may not only be lucky to get there where you are. And anyway, your philosophy have always been to do what you believed in, and not to care about being different. Difference is most probably a value for those who want things differently. Do you think they are in minority? Yes, they most probably are. They may not provide you with the comfort of the majority approach, but will not as well expose you to a high level of competition…
In the morning, you decide to filter the incoming mails, calls and other means of expression of attention, and start to build your visibility according to your best belief. Disregard the bullying types and put aside the pushy but otherwise honest ones, trash the meaningless, empty communications where not even the slightest piece of contribution may be detected. You already saved time and energy to focus. Answering your question: no, you were not only lucky to get here. You apparently worked for it. And if the half of success may be attributed to luck, you still have to work for the other half…
Fortunately, this exactly what you are the best at. Invest your efforts according to your best belief, work passionately to achieve what you have promised to your counterparts. You have succeeded already in a different context. You ‘just’ have to repeat it in a different one. This is exactly what made you enthusiastic. How could you forget it even for a moment?
