At The Ask it has been my mission to help early-stage founders turn their dream businesses into reality by overcoming the obstacles that stand in their way.

These obstacles currently include decision making, time and money management and cultivating a strong mindset. Another obstacle that rears its head every now again is that of ‘qualifications’.

What validates me to build this business? The founder asks.

Whilst there are no official exams you can pass to become an entrepreneur, many clients still feel lacking in some requisite credentials to build their specific business. Perhaps wishing they’d studied in the field they are operating in or had more of a track record in their space.

Many wait until they’ve done yet another course or program before feeling ready to go to market with their offer. Or perhaps never feeling truly ready.

Whilst it is valid to be concerned about having the requisite skills (and shows that you at least care about your craft) more often than not these concerns are unfounded.

Here is why I believe that the sheer act of building your business is what qualifies to build it.

You have to choose yourself

If you want to be a doctor then you better complete years of medical school to qualify you. The same is true of many other traditional fields such as law, architecture and academia.

In any job you need to ‘pass’ some kind of qualifying criteria to get hired. Even after the simplest of interview processes at the end of the day you still get to rock up on that Monday morning safe in the knowledge that you have every right to be there.

The same does not apply in entrepreneurship.

If you wait for someone else to tell you that you are ready then you will be waiting a very long time. To build a business you have to choose yourself.

And for the most part in entrepreneurship, by its very nature, you can never by truly ready. It is a more ‘gung-ho / fail fast and break things’ kind of environment worlds away from the academic rigour of certain fields that require years worth of study to reach the next level or enter the field in the first place.

From Harvard drop outs launching VC funded tech companies in Silicon Valley to creators living in the TikTok mansion we uphold youth as a virtue in entrepreneurial culture. Just look at the 30 under 30 lists that gain so much attention.

Why do we think this is? Aside from living in a culture that generally fetishises youth in the first place, it is the nature of entrepreneurship to be doing something new.

Entrepreneurship is all about firsts

Still teenagers, brothers John and Patrick Collison moved from rural Ireland to the US to study programming and build what would become Stripe, today with a market cap of $95 billion. You can read their story here.

They had a vision for a world of easier internet e-commerce transactions. Now we take for granted today the ability to buy and sell online and to make an income on internet — this Substack newsletter platform relies on Stripe’s existence for its entire business model. But that was not the case a decade ago.

This was a very hard problem to solve. You might argue that had these brothers spent time working in traditional banking institutions first that they wouldn’t dream of touching the problem with a barge-poll.

It is from a place of not knowing how things have always been done that in innovation is bred. Fresh eyes see problems differently and don’t even know about the rules they might be breaking.

I’ve spent my whole career fascinated by entrepreneurial career paths precisely because there is no set path or set of rules to follow to get ahead.

It is within their very nature that startups are defining new categories of products and services and creating things to hopefully make our lives better. So building your career in a startup environment means taking a risk that it could work out. But there are no guarantees.

Just look at the droves of people pivoting their careers into Web 3.0 right now. An unknown entity in may ways (certainly not one a career counsellor could have advised you on) but one where a lot of smart people are saying “here is something worth doing I’m going to take a bet that it pays off”.

Building my own business, The Ask, I looked around and saw a gap in the market to help people to make informed and confident choices about their entrepreneurial careers where I could not see others offering a solution.

Sometimes the startup chooses you.

Like a previous client Alice, who whilst working in a great career at global media firm observed how little support was available to help women make informed contraception choices. Today, The Lowdown is the world’s first review platform that puts women back in control of their contraception with its own unique dataset, medical experts and growing community to revolutionise the way women access contraception. Alice didn’t want to be a startup founder for the glory of running a business — she just cared a lot that women had better support with and couldn’t see anyone else taking on the problem.

I cannot tell any one of my clients with certainty that their businesses are going to work out. Starting something of your own is risky but we need to make these bets on ourselves so that we can keep innovating and advancing as a society.

The act of building your business is what makes you ready

Alice, like many of my clients, came from a different background than the field she wanted to build in. She did it anyway and many thousands of women have benefited as a result. She may not have began an expert in women’s health but now she is — after years of pouring in hours of time, research and energy into her business Alice is in minority of with her skills and knowledge on contraception.

Regardless of how ready any of my clients are on paper to run their businesses they share something in common — the passion to build their business.

Take Natassia, now the Founder of Wonderlust advocating for evidence-based sex and relationship education for couples. Despite coming from a finance background through our sessions Natassia has gained increasing conviction in her credentials due to the passion that she has for the field and desire to become an expert. Wonderlust now receives tonnes praise from those benefiting from what creates. Follow her here.

Having passion puts you ahead of others who would have no inclination to build this kind of company. It means you are willing to suffer (Latin translation passiō meant “suffering”) through the pains involved of building something because of your commitment to it.

In many ways I am audacious choosing to coach founders, having never built a business before this one. Starting out, I too had to overcome my doubts and fears and work on finding evidence of reasons why I was ‘qualified’ enough, such as my coach training, time working in startups and so on. Today I worry less about my credentials. After two years in the coaching field and writing a newsletter about entrepreneurship that’s reached over 70k views online I have less to worry about. If in 2020 I’d decided myself not ready then I wouldn’t have had the chance to start building the credentials I have today.

Sure — these experiences still don’t make me the most qualified person. But what does, is actually showing up and doing the thing every day.

Each day that you build your business you become more ready to run your business.

We qualify ourselves. It is through the thousands of pounds we have put into starting out, or up-skilling, that put us ahead of the people who don’t. It is in the sacrifices we make, the rejections, set backs and working on evenings and weekends. It is the choosing not to take a staple job and the opportunity cost we have forgone.

Being in the arena counts as much if not more than being qualified on paper.

A checklist to see if you are ready

A recent client who has been in PR until now, is starting a new business in a new field she feels less ready for. In our sessions she has seen how at the heart of her new business idea, lies telling stories. (Exactly what she’s been doing for years in PR).

These skills can be transferred over to her new business — it is all in the framing.

Far from suggesting that you just shoot from the hip and build whatever business you feel like building, the point of this post is to encourage you to self-select yourself into new territories. At the same time however, you should absolutely consider what business you would be well-suited to running by finding your founder-fit.

I have shared some of my thinking on this in previous posts:

• How to choose a business based on your strengths

• Business model design that takes you into account

• Making sure you have product-founder fit

Let your passion be a starting point and then work out whether you can create something meaningful from it.

If you think you have found something that you are not ready enough for on paper, have a look at the check boxes that I encourage my clients to consider as they decide whether or not they are in fact ‘ready’:

• You know more about the subject matter than most, at least enough to solve a problem that exists in the industry (even a small one)

• You have invested and sacrificed something in the effort to build it

• You are passionate, curious and committed to the industry

• You care about your customers and want to do good work

Hopefully, you can say yes to the above and you are not on a get-rich-quick scheme pretending to be something you are not. Get that qualification if you need it to operate in your industry — please. I’m not suggesting we go around pretending to have PhDs in fields we do not.

Just don’t self-select yourself out of building something because you’ve not built it before. That is the whole point.

You gotta play the game to win it, so choose yourself and start playing.

The market suffers no fools and will decide if you are ready at the end of the day and so the market may in fact show you that you do need to learn more about your field, or sales or copywriting or whatever. But don’t expect that learning curve to end one day; the job description of a founder is ‘problem solver’ so expect to be thrown into the deep end on a daily basis.

Good luck and if you are still questioning your qualifications, consider applying for coaching to avoid sitting on your potential and start building.

Thank you for reading as always!

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