You've heard of the 5 stages of grief right? I think there is a similar kind of progression when you are starting your own business
1. Excitement : "I have a great idea, maybe i'll make it into a business! Man, that is so exciting!"
2. Uncertainty: " Starting a business is a lot of work - I wonder if I can really pull this off"
3. Motivation: "I'm going to do this thing! I'm going to eat breathe and sleep my business until it's perfect!"
4. Frustration: "This is hard, and confusing, heeellllllpppppp!"
5. Delirium: " I think this might actually happen , this is weird, where am I? Is that a sandwich?"
And here we are now. Delirium. as Christine and I met up on Thursday night after we both had full exhausting days at our normal jobs, I could barely make it through our planned tasks without giggling uncontrollably and calling Christine "Sir" in a Cockney accent. Everything sounds funnier in Cockney accent for some reason have you noticed that?
We set off to take a second look at everything we had written in our orders for Fall so we could re-group and make sure our selections made sense. Unfortunately, we realized that every website we wanted to log into required us to submit a detailed request about who we were and what our store is like. We have obviously had trouble with this because, well, our store isn't exactly built yet. If you go to fancyfrenchcologne.com right now you get some jumbled Go Daddy mess. That ain't gonna fly with those vendors. So we try to convince them that we have a great idea that just hasn't been executed yet.
In 3 weeks we head off to New York to find the rest of our fall stock and meet with our web development team. Things are definitely still moving but it all still seems unreal. I move along deliriously hoping there is a 6th stage somewhere in the process where everything becomes clear and the business feels real.
xo
Car
cool to see what's going on Carly! As a fellow entrepreneur I fear that step 6 is "go back to step 2 and repeat"
ReplyDeleteThe advice I get is that entrepreneurship is a series of very high highs and very low lows and you just need to be resilient enough to stick out the lows. In my short experience this is true but what I didn't expect is that the highs and lows can come so close to each other - like several times a day.