Being an entrepreneur is lonely. There are very few people who understand what it is like to be an entrepreneur. The decisions that need to be made. The complexity of running a business. Staying alone can lead to isms like alcoholism, drug addiction, or workaholism. Even partnerships can be challenging—who do you talk to if you don’t get along with your partner? Learn more in this video about what it is like to be alone as an entrepreneur and ways that you can build your own support network to lean into.
One way to get support is to talk to a professional business coach like me. If your challenges feel overwhelming, give me a call at +1 (604) 721-5732 or Contact Me to set up a mutually convenient time for us to talk. You don’t have to do it alone.
Audio
Transcript
Can it be lonely being an entrepreneur?
Hi, I’m Coach David J. Greer. Today, I want to talk to you about loneliness and the role of an entrepreneur.
The short answer of course is yes, it can be incredibly lonely to be an entrepreneur. You’re the person in charge and there are just a lot of people who you cannot lean on. There are many times you can’t ask your employees; they’re looking to you for the answers. You can’t ask your spouse. In my experience, a lot of spouses have no idea what it is we do. You often can’t ask your investors, you sometimes can’t ask the chairman of the board, if you have a board of directors, if the problem that you’re trying to deal with is the chairman him or herself. So yes, it can be really lonely being an entrepreneur.
Some of us as entrepreneurs have been in partnerships and yes, that can work well. I was partners with Bob Green from Robelle for many, many years, more than a decade, and we worked together for 20. What we found was we had to go out for lunch once a month and talk about, well, just about anything but the business. When we did that, things went smoothly. And when we didn’t, things just didn’t seem to go right.
Now, eventually Bob moved to the Caribbean, and our company was still headquartered in Vancouver, and I was in Vancouver, and it got to where we weren’t even having dinner once a year, let alone lunch once a month. We just fell out of touch. We had different life goals, business goals.
Could we have resolved them? Possibly. We certainly couldn’t when we were so far out of touch. Eventually, Bob bought me out and we parted ways. Partnerships can work, but you need to really work at the partnership and staying in touch.
Another real risk of being alone as an entrepreneur is the isms, like alcoholism. I’m an alcoholic, thankfully, I have many years in recovery. However for many, many years I was an alcoholic and a practicing alcoholic. Maybe you have an addiction problem. You may be a workaholic. These things are virtually impossible for you to detect on your own and you need some outside person to help show you that this is going on.
At Robelle, there were some days I would leave early and go to the local pub ostensibly to read technical documents, which I did. It would make a lot more sense to do that over a cup of coffee, rather than three beers, and it wasn’t really that smart to do it right next to the office. I’m sure there were some employees who might’ve seen me there and wondered about it, but no employee is going to call out your alcoholism or your drug addiction. They might mention your workaholism, although you may have built a culture where they’re workaholics too. So again, you don’t have any kind of independent view on all of this or someone to be a sounding board and to help you.
My suggestion to you is don’t try and build a business alone.
If you have a person that you trust and complimentary skills, yes, consider seriously a partnership. And, like Bob and I did in the early days, make sure that you stay in touch. Once a month do something that has nothing to do with the business, that lets you just talk through life, through where you’re at, through how you’re feeling, so that the partnership can develop. And then know there might be a time when the partnership is not working and you’ll still need someone outside to be able to talk to. Find a mentor who has been there, done that, has been there before you, or is quite far advanced, who is willing to meet up with you on a regular basis and take your calls.
Industry peer groups for entrepreneurs I’ve been part of and can be highly effective. Just know that when you get involved with those, it typically takes about a year for the entrepreneurs to visit enough. Usually, you meet every month to meet, and to share, and to build enough trust where you can really share those icky, tough decisions, which as entrepreneurs, what we need to do.
And then finally, you can hire a coach like me. After Robelle, I tried a bunch of things and it really wasn’t working for me, and eventually I met coach Kevin Lawrence. He made me so uncomfortable that I had tears in the corner of my eyes realizing how unfulfilled I was. With Kevin’s help, I ended up hiring him, I started on a new path and of course, he was the person who really was instrumental in getting me to recognize my alcoholism and getting me into recovery.
Is it lonely being an entrepreneur? Absolutely, it can be really lonely, and it doesn’t have to be. Find that peer support, or mentorship, or coaching person, or group who can be there for you.
