I love being an entrepreneur. I would like to challenge anyone to give up entrepreneurship as it’s next to impossible to do so. Entrepreneurship is like a heady, infinite feeling. Each time you succeed, you are smitten by a stronger success for the next time, and you always want to make it to bigger heights. Entrepreneurs strive to leave an indelible mark for themselves, their organizations, people and for the work they love to wake up to every morning. From improving their products, services, profitability, thinking about ways to digitize and becoming the change agent that reaches millions, there is immense learning of diverse, new entrepreneurial languages along the way – languages of new communication, and moving from customer satisfaction to delight and advocacy.
Entrepreneurship exposes you to newer minds and opportunities for your enterprise. Most importantly you somehow find the best mentors, just when you feel the heat of dwindling cash flows and unbalanced balance sheets. It’s almost as if these mentors emerge from nowhere, magnetically so to speak, suddenly with a brand new electrifying insight that makes you cringe about why you ever thought of shutting.
I am a fitness entrepreneur, now a top 10 fitness professional, founder of the brand Integym and Intelligent Fitness, writer and author of the World’s first fitness novel, “Who Stole My Calories”. I credit my success to the fact that I was able to translate my passion and hobby to put together nutrition, pilates and weight training into a marketable service with the ‘intelligently fit’ proposition. Thus started my entrepreneurial venture 15 years ago. For the many naysayers, this was, without a doubt, a reckless plunge that would drown all my savings, more-so because I was in my forties at the time. “Chill and relax,” they said…forties are a time to plan retirement!
Today I am 55 and have more plans to achieve than I could ever dare to dream. I am ready to face unknown challenges even if I feel uncertain. When I attended my first NEN course and became a part of the 10,000 Women Entrepreneurs Program, I wasn’t aware that entrepreneurship would make me snap permanently the supposed unbreakable chain of conditioning that one grows up with. Women can’t be professionals.. says who? or take risks or achieve in a man’s world… says who?
Entrepreneurship has changed me enough to bust all these myths. Chilling, relaxing and retiring is no longer an option. With tonnes to do, the impossible still left to achieve. I just love being an entrepreneur. No way I am giving up on it.
