GBGames

Last week I finished reading Before You Quit Your Job: 10 Real-Life Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know About Building a Multi-Million Dollar Business by Robert T. Kiyosaki. It is part of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series of books. I actually finished listening to the audiobook Rich Dad, Poor Dad before reading this book.

The point of Rich Dad, Poor Dad is that there is a big difference between being poor and being rich, and it isn’t directly related to money. There is a big difference between being poor and being broke. It’s a mindset. A rich person will ask empowering questions, such as “How can I afford that?”, while a poor person would simply conclude “I can’t afford that.” Being broke is a temporary financial state. You can still be rich when you’re broke. You just have to think they way rich people do. Essentially, think and grow rich, or don’t think and be poor.

Before You Quit Your Job is a great book that talks about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Somewhere else, I got the idea that being self-employed and being an entrepreneur are separate and distinct. The idea was that even if you are running your own business, if it is something that someone else has already done before, then you have just created yourself a job. An entrepreneur creates something new.

Kiyosaki drilled the idea even further. Basically, you can are an employee, or you are an entrepreneur. Almost everyone is encouraged to go to school, get good grades, and get a good job with benefits. My own mother is still telling me that I need a good job for the benefits. When I was younger, my father would tell me that I needed to go to school to get good grades in order to eventually become the CEO or other high level officer in a company of my own. It sounded great, if vague, and I always had the vague idea that while I could become an employee, I would eventually run my own business.

I learned this past year that my father must not have really put much belief in it himself. A month after I announced that I would be running my own shareware video game business full-time, and therefore would need my family to support me until I was profitable, my sister informed me that he would talk to her about how I needed to “shape up” and “get a job”. Ouch. It’s not something you want to hear that far into it. Since I couldn’t rely on the support I was asking, I decided that full-time employment was the way to go. I’ll support myself, and then I will be the one to decide to support my business.

Anyway, the book is geared towards entrepreneurs looking to make a multi-million dollar business and employ hundreds of people. Entrepreneurs create a business, working on the business before it even exists, and then once their job is done, they get out of the way to let the business run on its own. My own plans for my business didn’t take into account the idea that it didn’t need me. I knew about the importance of setting up good systems; the idea of earning money while I sleep was a nice one to have.

At first I thought I wouldn’t get much value out of the book. I wanted to be in charge. I wanted to stay small. While earning millions of dollars is certainly possible, I didn’t think I needed to partner or hire with hundreds of people to get there. My plan wasn’t to create a business for someone else to buy, nor was it for giving other people creative control.

Still, the book helped to clarify what I was thinking. The main focus in the book was in helping people move from being employees (whether self-employed or not) to entrepreneurs; much of the content was useful only to those people. Still, even though I wanted to be self-employed, I found a lot of helpful information that overlapped. Some of the things that rich dad seemed to refer to negatively might actually be positives for someone who isn’t trying to be the kind of entrepreneur he was thinking of. Some of it gave me pause and made me think, “Oh, that’s me he is talking about. I’ll fix that.”

Reading through the 10 lessons and the stories that went with them, I was able to see that I still had some thinking to do. I know that there are some important tasks to handle in order to ensure that my business won’t fail immediately or sink under its own success. There are still some mindset changes to make.

Thomas Warfield reposted a 2004 article called Why Pyrogon Failed. You can read the original postmortem by Brian Hook as well.

Warfield boiled it down to failures in marketing and long-term planning. It is interesting that the About Us page makes it sound like the company is supposed to be independent, but the postmortem makes it sound like it was really supposed be a way to procure funding for a more mainstream company. In any case, it sounded like the mindset of the main people didn’t make the needed change to go from mainstream game developers to independent game developers and publishers.

When you work for a company, you have one job, and you do that job. You don’t need to worry about accounting, marketing, sales, distribution, or legal. You do your job, you get paid, and you do it again. “Safety” and “security” are the most important things to you.

When you run a company, you now have to worry about such details. Cashflow, marketing, and sales are not just meta-work. They ARE the work of the business. Product development is still important, but it is only a portion of what is needed.

Being an employee requires a certain mindset, but running a business requires another. You can hire help, but you can’t outsource marketing and sales and still expect to become successful.

If you want someone else to control your company’s destiny, you might as well be an employee. If you’re running your own business, you should want to control as much of its motion as you can. That isn’t to say that you should personally do everything, of course. It just means that you shouldn’t make business decisions that gives responsibility for your success to someone else.

Some time ago, $100 for membership in the IGDA seemed costly. I opted for the student membership at the time since it was so much cheaper. The Association of Shareware Professionals is another organization I have since joined, and at $100, it also seemed intimidating. On top of it all, there were magazine subscriptions and books to buy. I didn’t want to spend so much money that I could put towards a good couple of books!

Then I realized that I needed to change my mindset. Until then, I was looking at $100 and thinking, “That’s a lot of money.” I don’t spend $100 all at once very often. I had vague thoughts about how it could be a bad investment or that I might be throwing away $100. I realized, however, that I wanted to take my business seriously. I shouldn’t be so concerned about $100 because I should intend to make more than that easily. Heck, I made over $100 easily within a week during my regular job, so I would only be out a few hours of my time. The potential benefits sounded amazing, though. I could meet with other people doing the same thing I am doing, learn from them, and actually help dictate how the industry moves. $100 for all of that? It then sounded like a great deal.

If you aren’t satisfied with how your indie game business, or any business for that matter, is working out, you might want to double-check the mindset you’re in. Does it match your expectations? Do you have clear expectations to begin with?