Do It for Them! The Hallmarks of a Balanced Dadpreneur
Learning to grow your business is a lot like learning how to be a parent; when you are trying to be the best entrepreneur you can possibly be but also provide for your children, there always appears to be a struggle with balance. Many of us used to work from home more often, and these days, home working has become a part of the wider landscape, but when we are trying to set up a business and we’re trying to be an entrepreneur, or dadpreneur if you will, what do we have to remember in order to be an effective one, especially when they’re trying to build a business while improving as a parent concurrently?
Learn to Outsource the Right Things
Outsourcing is essential to any entrepreneur. As a parent, you have to learn the skills of outsourcing, regardless of the situation. You may find yourself in tricky situations, and you’ve got to learn to prioritise. But once you prioritise tasks, you also need to get rid of certain tasks that you are unable to do because you aren’t skilled in them. And when we start to build companies we have to take a hard look at our skills and what we can actually benefit from getting rid of. To build effective marketing strategies we’ve got to understand so many different things, but we cannot be exceptionally skilled in everything. Take developing an app, which is an area that will boost our business, but if we do not have the technical skills, we are better off investing in a company to do it for us. You can click for guides on the costs to develop an app to get you started, but outsourcing is something that you have to learn how to do. It’s not admitting you are weak or you can’t do anything. But you are definitely sending the right message to your child that you can get rid of things that aren’t 100% necessary when they need you the most.
Be Clear on Your Reasons
It’s hard to be successful at both parenting and dadpreneuring. You have to remember that doing both is going to push you to your limits. As a parent, you may very well be aware of those moments where you are beyond your limits, but when you start to consider being a dadpreneur, this is going to compound even further. It’s beneficial for you as a human being, but the most important thing for you to remember when things are good, terrible, or even worse, is why you are doing this in the first space. Starting a business teaches you a lot about yourself, but remember, you will face a lot of peaks and troughs emotionally. Always make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons.
Understand the Risk Versus the Reward
As parents, we have good days and we also have bad days. When starting a business, there’s a lot more risk at the outset, which means that we’ll have to put more hours in, and also recognise the fact that the stakes are very high when we’ve got family members depending on us. This is why it’s so important to recognise that, even if it is your passion project, you’ve got to have financial buffers in some way. You could have a partner who is in full-time employment, you could have saved up a lot of money to keep you going, or you have a side hustle in place, that you have to think about the worst-case scenario, business-wise. If the venture was to stop tomorrow, would everything be okay? This is why you should never risk more than what you are willing to lose.
Learn from the People Who Have Been There Before
Being a parent at home can be isolating, lonely, and a thankless task. Learning to run a business at the same time is about making sure that you are able to navigate both components effectively. When starting a company from scratch, we have a lot of big decisions to make. We have to rely on the help of others- sometimes it’s about having someone listen to our struggles so we can offload our problems, but seeking out someone who can be a mentor or a coach can be very therapeutic. Learning from the people who have been there before won’t just help you understand how to fix business problems, but it will help your personal ones as well. When we have really young children, we might find that we are banging our heads against a brick wall because we just don’t have another adult to listen to our needs. When we have someone else who is a sympathetic ear, we can work through problems we have, and eventually realise that they are not as bad as we think they are.
Be Committed
You want to set up something so you can provide for your children, and this is going to keep you going during tough times. This is why the commitment mindset is so crucial to being a great entrepreneur. Remember, a great entrepreneur will experience failures. It’s not about fearing failure, but it’s about understanding the tools you can utilise to progress better. Sometimes we can feel that we are put off by certain things because someone may have already had that idea, or we are just afraid to jump in. Sometimes you need to just do it. Taking those first few steps is always the hardest. Think about it from the perspective of your child when they’re taking their first steps- if they didn’t take those first steps, they would never have got up!
Remember that being a great parent and being a great entrepreneur is about navigating the ups and downs. You want to provide for your child, and therefore you may realise that you’ve got to do more work at the outset in order to give them the things they need. But you have to remember that your child doesn’t need things, they need you! So when you are going into the world of being an entrepreneur, you’ve got to ask yourself why you are doing this in the first place. If you’re doing it to give your child a certain lifestyle, this is noble, but there could be easier ways to do it. To be a solid dadpreneur, you need to do it for them.
