ENFP Career Advice: Love Your Job and Rebuild Your Finances | #AskDan
Don’t waste these next few years where you feel like you just have to slave away to make a bit of money before you can go for it again.
Jesse from San Diego sent me a question about good career choices for ENFPs who are maybe more wired to be an entrepreneur or an artist and need a gig or a job of some sort to hold them over while they rebuild their financial base so that they can go for it again.
The situation Jesse shared is this:
He’s an ENFP entrepreneur at heart and knows that’s what he ultimately wants to do, but in the past, when he’d go for it as an entrepreneur, he failed and ended up in some bad financial situations.
At this stage, he has not given up on his ENFP entrepreneurial dream, but he wants to rebuild his financial base for a bit before going for it again and he asked me:
What type of good careers for ENFPs could I do where I wouldn’t essentially go crazy, where it might be at least a little bit stimulating or at least I’d be able to put up with it for a couple of years?
If you’re an ENFP struggling with career in a similar situation, I think there are two different career routes you can go with this and the same would apply for someone who’s, let’s say, an artist. painter, or writer and wants to build their life around that art, but ultimately needs to be paying the bills at the same time.
ENFP Entrepreneurial Career: Route #1
The first career route for ENFP entrepreneurs in the making is to pick something that’s going to be fun and that’s going to be stimulating for you.
For ENFPs, this probably involves working with people, but that is not the same as what your business might be in the future and just really something where you can disconnect and get into it.
So you’ve mentioned you’re in San Diego. I’m sure there are a ton of outdoor activities and of tour companies.
What if you took people out fishing?
For example, what if you worked on a fishing boat where you took people out fishing for the day, or did walking tours of the city, or some kind of hiking, outdoor-related thing?
These come to mind for me because they’ll be stimulating and you’ll be working with people. It might not be the perfect ENFP career choice for you, but it will probably be a good amount of fun, and it won’t feel like you’re locked away in some office that you really dislike the day-to-day of it.
There’s also a good chance that maybe you get into something like that and you find you enjoy the day-to-day of it and then, after a while, you realize:
Hey, why don’t I actually just start a business around that instead of just thinking something like “Hey, here are some businesses people on the internet told me to start!”
You might discover an opportunity within the job that you’re actually doing because you end up finding that it’s really fun.
You see an opportunity, you realize maybe the people that you work for or work around aren’t as entrepreneurial as you, and you have these new opportunities to do something a bit different.
In a video I filmed a few years ago I talked about some of the best jobs for artists are side jobs where you just really don’t like it. I don’t mean “don’t like it” as in you hate it, but where that’s not your long-term career.
So you can pick something like being a bellman, or valet parker, or a waiter or waitress, or whatever it is some kind of a really hourly based job that you do to pay the bills that isn’t terrible.
This maybe involves some exercise or interesting people, and you can do that, but the thing is, you don’t ever really love it.
And that’s the point:
That you won’t get sucked into it and end up doing that forever.
That you’ll keep that pressure of wanting to do the thing you really want to do, whether that’s an entrepreneurial business or some kind of art.
The reason I’m explaining it in this post and saying to really focus on things that you’d actually enjoy is because you did mention needing a couple of years to rebuild your finances and it also opens up the possibility of discovering an entrepreneurial opportunity.
So if you’re doing something you really enjoy, maybe you organize some kind of tours locally, and you find:
Actually, I love showing people my city. I love meeting new people from different cultures and coming up with the scripts and planning and taking people to little known local spots!
You maybe end up really loving that and deciding to actually start a tour business and then – you have that experience already, which is a great place to start a business from!
ENFP Entrepreneurial Career: Route #2
The second career route that ENFP entrepreneurs in the making can go is to think about the skills that you need to develop.
You’ve mentioned having some business failures in the past.
Why did they fail?
What do you need to know?
What do you need to develop about yourself?
Would you need to just in general figure out what you’d need to do to have a successful business in the future?
Reflect on that for a bit.
Make a list of those skills and then look for some kind of job where you’ll be learning those skills.
Maybe your business failed because you hated to sell. You did not like talking to people about what you did, so no matter how good your product was, no one discovered you.
Well, then I might suggest getting some kind of a job in sales with a really good mentor, someone who will invest in you and help you develop that ability.
Entrepreneurship and management are also a skill, so maybe you can find someone you can work for in a small company where it’s a ten-person company, and you know that the owner or manager is really good at what they do and you have a chance to learn directly from someone successful.
Think about what you could learn.
Don’t waste these next few years where you feel like you just have to slave away to make a bit of money before you can go for it again. Look at it as a chance to develop your knowledge and your skills and prepare for the next time you’re going to go for it.
The same thing is true if you’re an artist and you’re reading this and you want to have an artist job, but you need to be earning money.
Still, your main desire is to grow your business around your art, whatever that is – whether it’s painting, or recording some kind of music, or filming videos, or writing.
Ask yourself:
What are the skills I could develop that will help me succeed in my future artist job?
Maybe something like digital marketing, learning how to grow online on Instagram, or learning photo editing. or some kind of marketing in general.
Maybe something like that would help your creative business grow. Maybe getting some kind of management job even though it might seem totally counterintuitive. Maybe learning how to manage people will be really useful because, as an artist, you like to just create, so learning how to hire people and manage people might help you get that marketing person or that freelancer to work for you in the future and help you grow your business.
So the two main choices for ENFP future entrepreneurs are:
- Find a job that’s going to be fun and allow you to really recharge yourself and also just be enjoying your day-to-day and maybe discover some opportunities
- Figure out the skills you need to develop to succeed in the future and find some kind of a job that allows you to develop those skills
Of course, you can combine these two, that’s even better.
The last thing I’ll add here:
You’ve mentioned in your email to me that you really had a way of going all in and financially hurting yourself with your businesses.
Think about that then next time you work for yourself.
What could you do with your business model, with your approach, to not make it such a stretch?
The main businesses I started were a freelance copywriting business and the other was a coaching business.
In both cases I had an income of, I’d say, at least $2000, if not a bit over that, within the first couple of weeks of starting that business, so why not take that approach?
In many, many businesses, it’s possible to start with money coming in from day one. I’ve done it in a lot of different businesses.
It’s just all about how you approach things and, if you start with money coming in from the very beginning, you have more confidence, you have less stress and less risk, obviously. and it really helps you build that momentum early.
This is why sometimes when people start their businesses with a loan or with savings, they don’t have nearly the same amount of momentum, urgency, and motivation as you do when you start a business where you have to make it work.
Fortunately, most of the time that I’ve started a business, I have not been basing it off savings or loans. I’ve just jumped right in and made sure that there’s enough cash flow to keep it going from the beginning.
I highly recommend changing your thinking around a bit and thinking of ways that you could do that.
If you are interested in building your own freelancing business or coaching business doing so in a way that cash flows early, I do offer a free email training and a ton of other insights and training around the topics of entrepreneurship and freelancing.
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