7 tips that will help you measure your entrepreneurial ambition: How far am I willing to go?

Entrepreneurs ought to really decide what their boundaries should be in business. Would their business be a world wide phenomenon and cut across borders? Would it be limited to a small community in country that is not known to a majority of the world's people? Whatever you do as a business its important for you to define your market and decide right from the outset who your target is. In scaling your ambition, there are certain factors that you really have to consider:
1. Honest self awareness: You ought to ask yourself at each stage of the development of the business if the whole world is your market or if you would be content with a simple piece of the action. A part of the market share in the sector to which you belong could be satisfactory to some people, but as you grow, you would realize that  there are more opportunities to seize and more money to be made. Your scope could be decided at the beginning and adjusted as you go.
2. Breaking the Glass Ceiling: A lot of women entrepreneurs have the ambition of being their own bosses. They want to be in charge, believing that being the boss would give them some level of fulfillment. Women often have to sacrifice a lot to get the front office in a major corporation. Marriages and relationships with people on the home front are bound to suffer. Women have to make sure that they get proper education and experience to fill these positions and where they are unable to compete on all the fronts- politics, academics, competence and dedication- they often resort to starting their own businesses where they can conveniently be boss.
3. What are you able to invest in the business? Do you have enough money to start full scale or are you just going to start small, bottoms up style  and raise the business to the height you desire? Start off capital is an important factor here. Of course, there could be constraints because of the lack of finance, but we really ought to do proper assessments to know how the money for the business can be gathered.
4 What will you take out of the business? The question goes to the heart of the situation Are you content with a regular stable income or do you look forward to being very comfortable from the returns you are getting? So entrepreneurs are not content with a small salary from the business and would rather take out as much as they can forgetting to plow back into the business so that there would always be capital invested.
5. Closely linked to point four is: would your business merely help support your lifestyle and require your attention 24/7 or would you put in structures that would enable it function even when you are not around? Businesses that are built around an individual are high risk since the business could be grounded if the central person is unable to work at any time.
6. Would your ultimate aim be to sell the business as soon as its mature or would you intend to keep it in the family. If you intend to sell, one consideration is for the business to continue smoothly, even after you have sold and taken you hands off. As the owner you may require to go into a process of transferring your  skills, processes and systems to the new owners so that there would be a flawless change of guards in the organization.
7. To be successful you need what Charles Handy describes as "a proper selfishness" Until a proper rhythm or pattern is put in place, an obsession to succeed is required on the part of the entrepreneur. This obsession would demand a lot of time and dedication on his part.