EDIT: I’d like to introduce our readers to Rashmi Vaswani. Rashmi is a real-live successful entrepreneur. Rashmi founded and heads Rage Chocolatier, which produces some of the finest quality home made chocoloates at their “choclotory”. Rage has been nominated as one of the hottest startups of the year by the TATA-NEN hottest startups award. Her advice on startups and her intimate knowledge of the chocolate industry should make very engaging reading. She will be doing a series of posts for us over the next few months. Enjoy!
‘To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business, and your business in your heart’
Why do we work? Most would give you reasons on the lines of - to pay rent , to save up for that holiday, to pay credit card bills, to get my kid into a better school etc etc – all ideas with the underlying reason being money. Apart from our cricketers, or Willy Wonka, almost everyone works for the money.
Do you think that you have to choose between doing what you love and earning a living? Some might even think that putting a price tag on doing what you love might ruin the thing for you. I believe it’s quite the contrary. If you love what you do and do it well, the money will follow.
A good business for you would be to find your passions and build on the things you are passionate about to create a successful business.
Here are some things that one would have to keep in mind when you try to make what you love your business
The Bare Essentials
The essentials of any business, whether it is what you are passionate about or otherwise, would remain the same. You would need a to identify the opportunity & customer need, make a business plan, work out the financials and acquire the start up money, check what licenses and permits you would need in place, identify labour and location requirements amongst other things. These necessary preliminary requirements should be taken care of before you delve head first into what you love so that you don’t have to take a step back to get foundations into place. This should be a preliminary exercise on paper to work out if the business is a viable one.
Is Your Passion a Profitable One?
The next step after you know that the business is viable is to see if it would be profitable. Passion will only take you that far if it’s not lucrative. If you’re passionate about it, it will sustain you through recessions and bad times but not if the business proposition isn’t feasible in the least. So this would be a good time to do some research on the competition, market potential and growth prospects for your passion.
Are you making Rational Business Decisions?
A very important part of this is to be sure that your passions are not taking you too far. You shouldn’t get carried away with your passions and not be a calculative and rational business person.
If you build your passion into a business, you will never get tired of it. And even if you don’t get the initial rewards, you will still go on because after all, it is something you enjoy doing anyway regardless of whether you are earning money from it or not.
What we do for money and love are most often very different things — but if you can coalesce the two, so much the better. To make a living doing what you love, you need to invest financially and emotionally in the work you love, because together they are an unbeatable combination.
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