CAREER - Why Ambitious People Are Choosing Business Over a Salary — Phil Rozier | Ep. 88

They've done it and they've crept away in the background because they're not interested in the rest of the world knowing about it.

I think, I mean, business origins are quite often, certainly in a younger age, is where I think a lot of businesses started from, you start doing something and as a character, your individual character, you either think you could do this better than your boss.

You either think your boss is a bit of an idiot and you don't really want to work with them.

And you're almost driven to think I could do this better.

So you go and set your own business up.

There are a few businesses that set up without having any work experience, but that's normally driven off the back of you've got an idea or a product or something new.

And you do hear of founders in their late teens, even at school age, setting up businesses.

And that's pretty impressive because you've got no experience of work or people or... economy or finances and yet you're so driven by a product that you have and a passion for it that you're willing to set up a business for it which is amazing because that's quite rare but i think it's yeah it's pretty it's pretty credible but

they're all of the big tech businesses now aren't they when you think about it like the mark zuckerbergs and the jeff bezos etc they they wanted to they had a product and it just got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and fair play to them for actually managing it all the way through that journey because and maybe you can talk about this a little bit because i've got this belief that what take the skills that you need to go from a to b are not necessarily the same ones that take you from b to c and d and e and all those places um and that could be that somebody starts a business but they might not be the person who, they can take it from like zero to 10 million pound in revenue, but they might not be the person who can go from 10 to 100 million pound in revenue.

And then the 100 million pound revenue and upwards mark is a completely different skillset in itself.

And then you've exited the business before as well.

So like it might take a different skillset to exit the business, but there are some people that have been able to ride that journey the whole way through, which I think is very admirable.

Maybe also there's a level of it's my baby and there's an arrogance to it and an ego thing.

And they aren't the best people, but they seem to be executing very, very well.

Yeah, that's a really good point.

And I think the arrogance is also balanced with humility because the very fact that...

these entrepreneurs stick with it for so long is normally a mindset of they recognize they can't do it by themselves.

So effectively they have the ability to say, I can't do this.

I haven't done this before.

I'm going to bring in people around me that have.

And very few people would take a business from startup and take it through to X amount of millions of revenue or size without additional support.

They'll always bring in experts around them.

So it's a sign of humility.

Because I think one of the challenges I see, certainly in the SME space now, is if you get a business owner and they take it to a certain size, and sort of size is irrelevant.

Let's say it was 3, 4 million of revenue or 15 million of revenue, 50 million of revenue.