Since I began my own journey as an entrepreneur, I have spent a lot of
time and effort considering what I had to do in order to achieve the goals I
defined for my business.
As a Coach and Consultant, I have clear what I am capable of doing, I am
confident in my ability to drive results and add value to my clients, however
the skills required to be a successful business owner are much broader than the
mere delivery skills.
In my old life in Europe I was an employee. Although I had to know very well
the different departments and functions of the business because of my role
within the executive team, my strategic support to the organization was focused
just on a specific component, that is the people within the business. Surely my
responsibilities were broad and various, anyhow they were all related to HR and
OD: hiring, onboarding and developing the right talents, coaching and developing
leaders, developing the most efficient and effective organizational structure
to support the business goals, maintaining and improving employee engagement,
promoting and maintaining an high-performing culture, managing the admin and
legal side of the employment relation in compliance with legislations and acts,
effectively and punctually managing the payroll process, the HR and OD budget, and
so on.
It was a clear slice of the entire pie, and I was confident of my
ability to effectively take care of it.
Now that I have my own business, I have to look after every single slice
of the pie. Having a business partner is a great asset because at least we can
leverage on each other strengths, however we are still both directly involved
with every aspects of the business. And, as new entrepreneurs, we are both
still learning. Not that I have ever believed that in life one can become “the Expert”
of something and just stop learning new things – and by the way how boring if
it was like that!
Despite the strains required, undertaking the entrepreneurial journey is
a unique opportunity that an individual can give to herself. No matter what the
destination will be in the end, it is the journey itself that is really worth
it. There are days of doubts, moments of discouragement, and there are days of
excitement and positive thrill. All these emotions come and go, sometimes you
feel like you are constantly on a roller-coaster, or like you are a pendulum,
oscillating from one edge to the other. Your mind is always spinning around
ideas, you can never really rest.
Lately I come to the conclusion that, at least for me, this journey is a
sort of extreme representation of Kolbe’s learning cycle: first of all you
experience something new every single day, especially at the beginning of the
adventure, when you try for the very first time to establish your enterprise,
and throughout the business development phase which takes a long time, many
months and more; thereafter, you review and reflect on each new learning
experience on a daily basis, because it is so very true that every day you come
across something new, sometimes unexpected, or even if it was expected, your
reactions are not what you would have imagined! The third step, the abstract
conceptualization – that is the actual learning from the experience in Kolbe’s
model – is an ongoing process, deeply connected to the reflection phase, intrinsically
embedded in the entire learning process. As a new entrepreneur – and I bet also
when you are a seasoned one! – you cannot stop actively experimenting new ways,
strategizing, planning and trying out ideas, things you learned, tools you
discovered along the way.
But first and foremost for me it has been amazing not as much learning the
different components needed to create an effective and sustainable business, and
neither as much all the things I have to master (admin, marketing, sales,
operations, etc. – things which were known by me, but not enough at a deep
level, and for sure not as I had to look after all of them myself!) but rather it
has been incredible what I have been discovering about myself, at a profound level.
Building a business from scratch for me has been so far a self-discovery, an
amazing opportunity to deepen and expand my self-awareness, to understand even
better my strengths and weakness, who I am and from where I came, what it is
really important to achieve for me in my life, who I want to be.
I still don’t know what the destination is, lying behind the last bend
at the top of the hill, and every day I have to make an effort to make peace
with that (being a control-freak, I must know exactly where I am at any given
moment!)
I am glad that each day I have the privilege to learn new things also inward,
as well as outward; I am lucky that I can take the time to observe and reflect,
I strive to find the way to conceptualize what I have been learning, even when
it is not so immediate to do so, because then from there I can experiment new
ways, I can chose a new direction or course of action, I decide whether to
commit to implement new behaviors that better serve my goals.
In conclusion, the never-ending learning process of this journey is
making me a more rounded person in any case, which is an invaluable result no
matter what. It may happen that the business won’t ever flourish as much as I
would like, but surely I am becoming a better version of myself. Priceless!
Antonella Capizzi
