The mental approach to beginning an online endeavor is much different from that of an employee. If you are like I was, an employee, raised by employees, and have known nothing but being an employee for livelihood, then the first thing you are going to have to change is your way of thinking about compensation.

In the very beginning of my online entrepreneurial career, I remember my wife asking me, ‘How much are you making an hour?’ I tried to explain to her that I was trying to build something and that measuring wages per hour was the wrong way to look at it, potential was what I was interested in. Building and creating a business was what I was doing, and for that matter I was enjoying it. By contrast I found my day job boring, depressing, and dead end. Fast forward seven or eight years later, I am no longer married to the inquiring wife, and make more money online then I ever did as an employee.

It did not happen overnight, and it did take hard work, that goes for both the divorce and building an online business. But for the most part building an online business from total scratch, was challenging, invigorating, and transformed me as well. Having always been an employee and raised by employees, and in fact previously married to an employee raised by employees, I had always thought of a straight trade of my time for money. I understood that the more value you had to your employer the more your time was worth, but in the end there was only two ways to increase your earnings one was increasing the time you spent at your job. And the second was to increase your value, usually by increasing your skills which also would take your time.

What I had to learn by working online was the exponential value of potential. The potential of everything you do in your online business has an exponential value. Let’s say you have a happy customer that bought something for $5, and say on that one sale made you $2. All is well and good enough, you have a two dollars in your pocket for your efforts. Now if you were to use the employee framework of thinking, you could see how long it took you to make those dollars. You had to make or order your product, you had to put it on the internet, you had to pack and ship it, maybe in between answer an email or two. You chalk up all your time and maybe it took you an hour to make those dollars. Well you could easily beat that in a part-time job at the local 7-11.

But the entrepreneurial way to look at it is different. You have already invested the time to order the products; I assume you ordered more than one. You already invested the time to list it online, and any methods you used to get your customer to your product. Now all you have to do is ship it, and maybe answer the email or two. And guess what you can pay someone to ship it for you, taking maybe another 50 cents out of your two dollars, but now you made 1.50 additional for doing virtually nothing. And you can repeat this process forever. And the happy customers will tell more people creating more happy customers, thus snowballing your business right before your eyes. After time you have $1.50 cents rolling into your pockets without you doing a thing. You can even outsource your emailing. You have created something that now produces income without your help. Thus you are no longer trading time for money. Money is being created without you putting more time into it. You created something one time and it creates money.

This is the potential of your early efforts, your early ideas, your time invested. In fact it is the difference between investing time and spending time. Just like the difference between investing money and saving money. Your efforts are investments that grow. And just like the stock market your time investment does not grow in a straight line. There will be up periods and down periods. There will be times when your time investment is production a negative return. It is during this time that many people quit, just like many people sell their stocks. These people are no longer motivated by the potential of their return of time. And they have quit their online venture to return to the sure thing of trading time for money. It is much like putting your money into a savings account it is safe and reliable, but in the end the returns are far less than investing the money.

For the true online entrepreneur this is never even a consideration. I am not saying quit your job today for your idea. I am saying keep your job, but keep working on the potential of your idea, until the fruition of that idea has made it possible to quit your job. It can and does happen, but not by applying the employee mentality. You must apply a mentality of working for potential.

Bryce Kennedy left corporate world after 20 years to work from home. He writes about e-commerce at http://www.how-to-ecommerce.com he can be reached at bryce@how-to-ecommerce.com