Career Survival Week 5/5 – Find Your Inner Entrepreneur

This post is the fifth of five in a series on this blog called "Career Survival Week." See the end of this post for links to the others.

If it seems odd that I made it all the way through career survival week without mentioning entrepreneurship or striking out on your own to start a business instead of working for "the man" (or the woman, for that matter) – this is the post for you. Being an entrepreneur isn't just about starting your own business, though. There are many other ways that you can tap your own latent entrepreneural spirit to help you survive the recession. Here are just a few:

1. Start a side business. Some say the best time to start your own business is while you're still employed somewhere else. The risk is lower, security is much higher, and sometimes your current job can open the doors that you need in order for your personal business to succeed. You need to be careful about overlap or potential conflicts of interest, but as long as you're not doing your personal work on company time, or directly competing with your employer – you should be ok.
2. Launch a new product or service from within. Along with the advice I shared earlier in the week about thinking outside of your job is the idea that sometimes you can launch new products or services within the company you work for. Think of a part of your current job as thinking like a startup. What is something new that you could spearhead the launch of based on what you already do? The side benefit of something like this is that if it works, it can make you more indispensible at work.
3. Take a calculated risk. Everyone will tell you not to put all your eggs in one basket … but most people don't put them in any baskets. They either eat them, or throw them out once they go bad. The point of this analogy (which is rapidly going south, unfortunately) is that now is a good time to take a few risks – because most people aren't. So find that promising idea and put some money behind it. Donate some of your time to help your college friend launch that new effort. Risks are like homes right now – now is the perfect time to find the right one because a lot fewer people are looking.

I hope you found Career Survival Week useful as you plan for the next stage of your career in this crazy job market. Next week, it's back to "regularly scheduled programming" – including a post for tomorrow that I've totally enjoyed writing on marketing lessons from a very unlikely place …

Career Survival Week On Influential Marketing Blog (links to every post below):
What To Do When You Lose Your Job | Using Social Media To Keep Your Job | Job Seeking 2.0 | How To Rock An Interview  |  Find Your Inner Entrepreneur