Starting your own business is always hard work, but mostly exciting. At times, especially in the ideas phase, you will explore and research your idea with the laptop and a good glass of wine. In most cases, you will still have the security of your regular day job.

Nothing is pinned down yet, and any investment you will have put into your business is marginal. This is where it ends for most would-be entrepreneurs. Being your own boss is for many just a pipedream, and the realities of having the certainty of recurring bills every month might prove too much of a hurdle to make the jump.

But a handful will persevere and go from an idea to having an actual business launched. This is where the marathon truly starts from making sure you can live off your regular day-job, but at night and on weekends pour in every ounce of sweat, blood and tears, and sometimes even money, to get your business off the ground.

Again, most will try for a while and give up. Just the very few make it see their business idea turn into a viable business, albeit it still small and labour intensive. This is the point you could potentially go to the bank or get funding to grow your business.

If you made it this far, you should pat yourself on the back, and you can legitimately call yourself a successful entrepreneur. You have gone from a group that is too large to count of idea-people, to a crowd of working-on-it-people, to the very few of successful-business-launch-people.

And as money pours in (hopefully) to help you grow, you would think that you can kick back and see everything fall into place, right? Perhaps not.

Most serial-entrepreneurs will tell you that going from an idea to a start-up is tough as nails, it requires a lot of patience, belief in self and a healthy dose of luck. Going from a start-up to a scale-up requires a thick skin, willingness to let go of egos and a healthy dose of humble pie.

Whereas in start-ups everything is fluid and you (and your start-up partners) get your hustle on, perhaps playing things fast and loose, the scale-up is actually taking all the unpredictability and killing it.

Businesses need reliability to work. I.e. a client needs to know he or she is getting their product on time and as advertised. Employees need to know they can go to work each day and expect to be paid when payroll runs.

These simple things we take for granted when being a client or employee actually take a lot of effort and thought when it has to be built from the ground up. And all this routine and building standardised processes might not be the best of topics for someone with an entrepreneurial spirit. Others might be better suited to know why all business need Google email (tip: it’s scalable and reliable beyond belief) or should invest in a proper SaaS accounting solution with a payroll plugin (tip: because who really likes accounting?). Get specialists in to build the business, this means you can start exploring your next big idea!