What are the Pros and Cons of Entrepreneurship?

In Indonesian, the word entrepreneur is “wirausaha” and is derived from the words “wira” and “usaha”. “Wira” means warrior, hero, superior human, role model, virtuous, brave and great character. The word “wira” is also used in the word “officer”. Meanwhile, “usaha” means “action to achieve a goal”. So, entrepreneurship is a warrior or hero who performs actions to achieve a goal.

Read also: What is Entrepreneurship? And 12 Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs

The strength of a country depends on the number of entrepreneurs that exist. Because the more people who are self-employed, the more they will create jobs, which will increase the welfare of a country.

Indonesia as a country with a very large population of around 280 million people, and a very large need for employment every year relies heavily on entrepreneurship to help the government. Therefore, in the last few decades, many young people, especially the Millennial generation, are very interested in pursuing entrepreneurship compared to working in large companies.

Many of these entrepreneurs are successful and become large companies, but not a few who fail and eventually close their businesses, to return to work at more stable companies.

Many entrepreneurs when starting their business, without thinking, and only see or hear what people say.
“It’s good to be an entrepreneur, free anywhere”, “So entrepreneurs don’t have to work 8 hours a day”. “Building a business can be on autopilot, automatically works for you”. All the lures above cannot be said to be 100% wrong, but also not 100% true. In the end, many leave their jobs as employees in large (professional) companies and become entrepreneurs just because of prestige and misinformation. As if being an entrepreneur is more than being a company employee (professional).

Entrepreneurial Advantages:

Therefore, it is good for us to see and study the Strengths and Weaknesses of Entrepreneurship. This is to prepare you to make decisions before you invest your funds, time and energy.

1. Freedom to do what you like while earning a living.
2. The opportunity to realize dreams or idealism. It could be fixing existing problems or making something new. For example, replacing plastic pellets that are currently damaging to the environment with environmentally friendly materials.
3. To reach your full potential.
   Entrepreneurship means that we are free to decide and develop the potential of ourselves and our team towards what we aspire to. Trying things, you could not do before.
4. To reap benefits to improve welfare.
5. Contribute to customers and the wider community.
6. Get recognition for your efforts.

Lack of Entrepreneurship or Entrepreneurship:

• Income Uncertainty.
  Setting up and running a business does not guarantee certainty of income every month or every year like working. In fact, not only do you get no income but can drain your savings.
• Risk of losing all investment.
  The failure rate for small businesses is relatively high. Michael E Gerber – in his phenomenal book The e-myth, he shares that in the United States 40% of small businesses that just started their business, shut down in the first year. Then 80% of it is closed before the 5th year. The rest of these small companies, 80% of them will close before the age of 10 years. So only 4% of small companies can survive more than 10 years.
• Long and hard-working hours.
  If you imagine that entrepreneurship is more relaxed and has more free time, because of the lure of “autopilot” above, maybe you should rethink your decision to become an entrepreneur.

  One survey from the New York Enterprise Report found that small business owners worked twice as much as regular employees. It was also found that 33% of small business owners reported working more than 50 hours per week, and 25% said they worked more than 60 hours per week.

• Living thinking of business all the time, Quality of life is lower especially at the beginning of the business was founded.
• Demands and Responsibilities become complex.
  Entrepreneurs are required to study and make decisions about issues beyond their expertise.

  For example, if you are a hobby and expert in making cakes, then you decide to open a cake shop, more than 50% of your time will be spent no longer making cakes, but taking care of customer orders, customer complaints, to calculate finances, how much production costs, how much you must sell in order to stay profitable.

By looking at the advantages and disadvantages of building a business or entrepreneurship, hopefully, you can prepare more carefully. Avoid opening a business just because of frequent escapes.

Read also: Benefits of Entrepreneurship for Millennial Generation

You have worked for a large and well-established company, but because of a demanding job or a very demanding boss, you decided to start entrepreneurship or become an entrepreneur. This is very wrong considering when running self-employment, of course, your customers will be more demanding on you than your current boss.

Being an entrepreneur (entrepreneur) or being an employee (professional) is just as good, no one is better than the other. This should be carefully thought out according to each of you. Which one fit you the best.