When Steve Martin turned 50, he knew things needed to change. He’d spent 30 years climbing the corporate ladder and reaching the executive suites of a prestigious marketing company. But he was burned out and wanted a new passion project. So, he gave himself 1,000 days to figure it out. “I didn’t want to do something rash,” Martin says. “A thousand days is about three years—that felt like a good term.”

He kept his day job in the meantime, quietly trying different approaches to rediscover his passion. He considered going back to school; he thought about partnering in a business. But nothing stuck. “I didn’t feel passionate about anything,” Martin says. “I was so burned out.”

And then one day he heard a piece of advice: Go find what you were passionate about when you were 16 years old. That’s when everything crystallized for him. Martin had worked on bikes all summer long when he was a teenager and loved it.

Almost 1,000 days to the day after Martin decided to make the leap out of his corporate job into entrepreneurship, he opened Bike Bistro in Fort Myers. The first 90 days were “kind of scary,” he says. He was under a lot of pressure to make it work, and “some days nothing would happen.” But then slowly, over time and through word of mouth, the shop’s reputation spread. And then it took off.

“From that point on, we had amazing growth,” Martin says. The shop doubled its gross revenue every year. It tripled its space. It became the go-to shop for bicycle enthusiasts in Southwest Florida.

Along the way, Martin learned some important lessons about entrepreneurship.

Erik Kellar/Photographer

Plan on five years, not three.

The common wisdom is that a new business needs three years to get off the ground. “But it’s more like five or six years in today’s economy,” Martin says—that’s how long it took Bike Bistro to gain traction. The shop needed time to establish itself in the community, build up a business through word of mouth and eventually start doubling its revenue.

Look at employees as an investment.

Martin spent his first two and a half years as an entrepreneur doing everything. He worked in his shop seven days a week, running himself ragged. Finally, a good friend and mentor told him, “You’ve got to hire someone.” When Martin balked, his mentor said, “Don’t look at it as an expense. Look at it as an investment.” That’s how Martin came to hire his first employee, a detail-oriented bookkeeper. “He liked doing the things I don’t like to do,” Martin says. It was the first of many good hires for the shop.

Keep pushing.

“You’ve got to work hard,” Martin says. “You might not feel like going in one day, especially if you’ve been there every day for the last 10 months. But you’ve got to keep pushing.”