Now having worked with over 6,000 clients globally, there is a universal trait I see in almost all my clients: most of them dream to be entrepreneurs! This applies to clients not just in the US, but also anywhere in the world (I have clients in 23 countries). This applies to even senior executives and C-level clients. How do I know? As a key part of my intake process I have a comprehensive questionnaire that explores their strengths, development areas, regrets, and dreams. Nearly 85% respond positively to the question on their entrepreneurial interests or having a venture on the side as they do their everyday job for a steady paycheck.

About 10-15% of my clientele has their own venture in various stages of development; many more have one on the side as they earn their corporate paycheck. I decided to write this blog to demystify how anyone can nurture their entrepreneurial dream, while they hold their corporate job and how to navigate through the transition to become a full-time entrepreneur. This blog is written more for those who need a roadmap for their entrepreneurial journey than it is for those who are looking for advice based on some legal framework. Since I am not a lawyer I want to make that disclosure first.

Here is my step-by-step guidance that you can grasp without having to read a whole book and then decide if you, too, want to take the plunge. There are many excellent books on this topic for you to get detailed guidance in different areas of entrepreneurship such as raising venture capital (more on that at the end).

1. Keep a journal to record your ideas that can become a business or a venture. Write down the ideas and note how each idea can translate into something that can become a scalable business. If you cannot scale such a venture then you are pursuing a life-style business. A life-style business (VCs will not fund such a proposal) generates income to support your life-style, but does not necessarily make you wealthy. It also can do this at a lower risk threshold.
2.  Once you have an idea that is exciting quickly create some model to showcase by translating your vision and refining it without spending too much time or money. Show it to people you trust and get their reaction. If it gets positive response you have something worthwhile to pursue. At this stage it is a good idea to have a partner to complement you as a co-founder.
3. Survey the market and assess the competitive landscape . Look at the competition broadly, not just in the context of the product or service you want to market, but from the customers’ views. If they had some money to spend on a need how many ways will they spend it to fill that need? Each of the items that fills that need is your competition. Many rookie entrepreneurs like to think that their idea is so unique that there is no competition. If you do not have competition you do not have a market.
4. Zero-in on the offering that fills a specific need that you can address and then define the total market in that space. Now look at the competition and find out what you can offer to beat the competing offerings to position your offering. Develop a prototype and test it with a segment of the market that you want to address and try it out with a few customers in that segment. Refine it and build your Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
5. Once you succeed in getting potential customers excited about what they just tried, you need to move to the next phase of your venture: limited scaling. Here, you build a large enough sample of your prototype to put the product/service in the hands of enough users to get useful feedback and the sample market reaction. Use this feedback to iterate your product for the next round of scaling.
6. At this point in your venture’s evolution you may need some outside seed money to take the venture to the pilot phase (so far, it has been your own money or borrowed from relatives). In today’s market it is relatively easy to raise $100K-$500K seed money (Angel funding) if you have a good founding team, a compelling story with your product in the hands of enough customers with enough good things for them say about it, and a good business plan. This round can be raised with convertible notes. Ideally, this is when you quit your day job! If you have a short financial runway wait to do this until the next step. 
7. Once you have enough market trials and a few more product iterations using the seed money you are ready for serious money to take your venture to the next level. Venture capital is one option, but it is quite dicey and you can lose much of your equity by going that route—and your time raising it. You can lose control over the venture, but also get some expert guidance and talent from the VCs that invest in your dream, in return.
8. Once you get the first round of funding (Round-A: $1M-$10M) you are now in the big leagues. You need a solid team in place to achieve this funding round and a plan to hire the right talent to grow your venture to the next level. It is at this stage that most founders tank because their focus has been more on their idea, technology, and their product/service and less on the business, the market, and competition. Their inability to make a shift in their mindset sometimes blocks them from going beyond this stage and their investors can take operational control to further the venture, appointing their own CEO.
9. If you now succeed in delivering all that is required to execute goals for your “A” funding round you are ready for the “B” round ($5M-$50M). This phase of the evolution results in venture scaling to play a role in the big leagues and to establish your brand.
10. If all goes according to plan in about five years your venture should be able to exit either with an IPO or a purchase by one of the big players in your space.

There has been much discussion of late about a venture’s funding source as being from a VC compared to some alternate and creative ways of avoiding VCs altogether, especially if going the IPO route is not your main objective.  To give a perspective of the odds against a VC-funded venture going IPO, I’d like to borrow from a recent article, Five Reasons not to Raise Venture Capital, by a VC herself, Rachel Chalmers:  The odds of achieving a targeted outcome for a VC are so far from being in your favor, it’s absurd. Not winning-the-lottery absurd, but an order of magnitude worse than that old one-in-ten rule of thumb.

Let’s leave aside the outliers like WhatsApp and focus on enterprise software, a business I know, Rachel continues, and one that’s slightly less subject to the whims of wanton Gods than consumer-land. As an industry analyst, I covered 1054 enterprise software companies over a 13-year span. Of these, 75 were incumbents or enterprise end users of other vendors’ software, so let’s say 1000-odd were venture-backed startups. Where did they all end up? Rachel continues her argument with the answer:

Well, 188 of them were acquired, in deals that ranged from the sublime (Citrix paid $500m for XenSource, which had trailing 12-month revenues in the $1m range) to the ridiculous (many, many face-saving exits of failed firms consisting of a nominal fee in exchange for their patent portfolio). Note that an exit in the tens of millions, which is a champagne-and-confetti Retirement Level Event for the owners of a bootstrapped company (like Sleepycat Software or Platform Computing), can be a disaster for a venture-backed firm. In particular, since the investors own preferred shares (which means they get paid first) and the employees own common stock (which means they only get paid if there’s anything left over), the people who actually did the work can walk away from a multi-million dollar acquisition with nothing to show for it but sadder and wiser hearts.

She further re-iterates: Back to my cast of one thousand: 28 of them failed so hard they don’t even fog a mirror any more. Google their corporate site and get domain-squatter linkspam. No face-saving exits for them. I won’t name names. Eight went public: eight out of a thousand. Their names are Opsware, Rackspace, salesforce.com, ServiceNow, SolarWinds, Splunk, VMware, and WorkDay.

Rachel concludes, What this means is that you are more than three times as likely to crash your startup, as you are to ring the Nasdaq opening bell. Your chance of utter failure is around 3%.

Again, according to Rachel, your chance of going IPO is just under 1%, and, I believe her!

My take, IPO is not the only way to exit a venture, so do not limit your options to pursue your venture through VC funding, since many other creative ways to fund it can be fruitful, if not lavishly rewarding.

Now, if you dread humiliation of failure or even are scared of how to deal with the disorienting, freakish success of your venture, see this powerful seven min. TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love and take the plunge!

Good luck, any which way you decide to do it!