It’s a good idea to ask yourself this question and to answer honestly before you jump out on your own to buy or start a business as an entrepreneur.

A dreamer can envision a successful venture and an independent life but doesn’t have the lean-forward attitude to make it happen.

Entrepreneurs can envision a successful venture and independent life and take the steps necessary to make it happen.

An entrepreneur will sell his house to turn his dream into reality. An entrepreneur will embrace the fact that when you sign the deal, there’s no turning back. Being an entrepreneur is to understand that it is a 24-hour, 7 day a week responsibility to make it happen.

The statistics say that most businesses fail during the first five years. That could have certainly happened to me after I purchased the Buford Trading Post.

Five things that bolstered my ability to succeed – factors I recognize now more than I recognized them then.

1. It helped to be the only game in town – so to speak. There was no competition for twenty-five miles in either direction.
2. It helped that I wasn’t an experienced businessman. I had no preconceived ideas about “the way to do things” and was open to experimenting.
3. I could have gone back to my previous career if the Buford Trading Post had been an utter failure.
4. I had a degree of flexibility when it came to the products I carried and the prices I charged.
5. I had a huge incentive to succeed and a track record of being willing to work hard. I had a son to raise and I needed to succeed at Buford, in part, to provide the stability I wanted for him.

I didn’t think of myself as a rugged individualist in the early years of my life before I took the plunge to become an entrepreneur. I do see myself that was now. Buford, in many ways, made me a rugged individualist.

I think being an individualist is directly related to being willing to change—and that means being willing to take chances. That’s at the core of the “wild West” way of life, in my opinion. People who settled the West were willing to take chances and to make dramatic changes in their lives. They took on the adventure of finding new places and developing new ways of surviving in those places.

Western settlers were true entrepreneurs. They had the magic combination of dreaming and doing.

Who knows what you might do or become?  Keep dreaming and start doing!

For more on my life story and how it may help you add to yours, I invite you to buy my book, Buford One, at amazon.com or at barnesandnoble.com.