I haven't logged in here for a few months but I just passed the 1 year milestone since I opened my first shop which makes my company part of the 10% of those who survive their first year. In just a few weeks time I will also complete my third year on this forum.
I have wanted to write this post for a while already but didn't have time to do it nor did I really know how to write it but this 1st year milestone is a good opportunity to stop and look back at what has been achieved and I thought I could share with you some of the things I have learned.
Just in case some of you need more background to believe what I am about to write here, I have started my business from nothing (really nothing) and this same business is now 1 year old, I have a good team of people working for me, I just opened a second branch a couple of months ago and the business has been profitable from day 1 (no choice as I started with no money).
Investor vs starting from scratch
I have been asked many times why I have never wanted to take a loan from a bank or why I haven't looked for an investor. My answer is always the same: when you start your first business, you have 0 experience so you are very likely (or in other words you will) to make mistakes. If you get money from someone (if you ever manage to get someone to give you money when you have no experience that is), you will most likely loose it because of your mistakes.
Whereas if you start from scratch, you still have no experience but you go step by step, learn the process on the way, make a little bit of money, reinvest this little bit of money in your business. With the little experience and the little money you now have you can repeat the process a little quicker and make a little bit more money, you have now a little more experience and a little more money that you reinvest into your business... There is no risk for you as you still have your day job if you make mistake but the idea is to keep your business working in its own money. Then soon, your business is making enough money for you to quit your day job and as you are now full time on it and with more experience, you can make it grow faster and so on...
That might sound stupid but it works. That's what I have been doing during the past year and it is going well.
I would like to have my business but I can't find an idea
This has been said so many times here but it is so important and very few people seems to get it when they start.
People want to find a good idea in order to start a business. This is taking things the wrong way around.
Why would you like an idea if you are not sure you can sell it. What you want is a customer. Find your first customer and remember how you got it, then rinse and repeat the same process over and over again.
Marketing
That is where the business makes or breaks. That being said, there are so many people and company trying to take advantage of you with poor services in this field that it is ridiculous.
Among them, people who assure you they can get you on the first page of Google, people from Yell or yellow pages (whatever it is called in your country) who try to sell you paid advertising, people who want to manage your social media, newspaper (local or not) that wants to get you to advertise with them... you name it.
I now work on the basis of: If they contact you, they need you more than you them. So if I no longer accept any of their offers. If I want to go for a special marketing option, I will research it, find it and contact them.
Just a few more bullet points on marketing:
Customer service:
There are very few businesses that are not interacting with their customers and yet so many of them that have a crappy customer service.
Attention to details is the name of the game here. Every business will try to be give their customers a good experience but pretty much none of them (at least in this country) will go the extra mile for them.
This sounds obvious but actually this is what will get you the word of mouth you want from your customers (another free way of marketing - if not the best of them).
Always go the extra mile for your customers, this is the most important thing of all,
Hiring people:
The human resource part of the business is the one I find more challenging. And I am lucky enough to really have a good team so if this wasn't the case I don't even want to think about it.
When I hire someone, I don't care about their qualifications. Hell I am not even qualified for the business I am doing, I need to get people to work in it because I can't do it myself. OK I am lying a little here (not on the part that I am not qualified to actually work in my business tough). I do ask for their qualifications because I must have them for insurance purposes. So I ask to see them, make of copy of them and then forget about them.
What I am really interested in though is the mindset. Are they motivated enough to work like crazy with me? (I am not gonna hire someone who is here to take advantage of my hard work). Are they willing to re-learn everything they already know to work in the way I want them to? (I only hire young people who need money, they will work for the money and are still flexible enough to get trained properly. Older people think they already know how they have to work and I don't care about that, I want them to work the way I want).
So motivation and mindset is the most important for me. The first person I hired wasn't even qualified for the services we provide but she was really willing to work and make the company grow with us so we paid for her training and she has been one of our best assets so far.
Managing your team:
In my experience I have seen two ways of managing people: by fear/threat or by making them want to work with you.
Managing by fear works very well... but no in the long run.
Making people want to work with you is slower to start but you have them for longer (notice I didn't say forever )
Make your choice. In my case, I an uncapable of managing people by fear, it is not me. I respect people and I always try to give them the best I can. This means the best working conditions, the best salary I can, the best treatment I can afford etc... In return I ask for loyalty and respect. I will be nice to anyone (in my business or out in real life) but if someone disrespect me I will have no problem is smashing them into the ground and I will do it with pleasure.
Always treat your employees as the great help they should be for your business. I can't say that mine are like my kids because the age difference is too small and I don't have kids but I do treat them like my brothers and sisters.
Accountancy:
I can only talk about the UK here because I don't know how this works in other countries but my view on it is that there is too much for me to know in this domain and as I am a foreigner in this country I am even less interested in spending time chasing pennies. Some people like to do that and they don't charge too much for it, gosh make them happy and give them what they like
I will only consider hiring a finance person when the cost of the accountant will become higher than the price I would pay someone to do it internally.
Keep your costs low:
This is something that sounds easy but is actually pretty hard to do and even more so with a team of women I find.
When you start making some money then you will start thinking: maybe I could work with a better laptop, machine, system (whatever it is), or maybe now I should print branded t-shirts or mugs or...
The thing I ask myself everytime is: will this get me more customers? and if yes will this amount of extra customers pay for the investment I am making? If I can't answer yes to BOTH questions then I don't do it.
An example for me, as I am a service provider, I could do with a receptionist. But I can't afford to hire a non-productive person (Hell I am already here for that ) so what do I do? I lock the door of the shop when my people are all busy inside with customers and put a sign explaining that the shop is actually open and explaining the reasons why the door is locked and the time we will unlock it. I also give them the possibility to book themselves in online on our website or to leave us a voicemail or an email. People now know that and although we might miss out on a few walk-ins, 98% of our business is on appointment and the walk-ins I miss out on wouldn't pay for a receptionist's salary.
Even more so now that I opened the second branch, the occupation rate being lower for the moment, I just made a call diversion to receive all the calls in the second branch and the person working here can manage the appointments for both places when she is not busy with customers.
Website:
Yes you need one right from the start, no it doesn't need to be perfect.
Is your business perfect from the first day you open? I guess not so it is the same for your website. And you can get the first version done yourself for free and in less than a couple of hours.
Then improve it as you go.
What if you fail?
It is not "what if" it is "what when" you fail.
You WILL fail that's for sure, but unfortunately that's how we learn.
Before I started this business, I spent three years trying about 10 different projects. I tried a lot of different things and failed on all of them. I lost three years and all added up together probably somewhere between 15 to 20 grand over this period of time between bad marketing, bad idea, getting scammed, stopping before it was even sure it wasn't going to work etc... I have made a lot of mistakes. You can see some of them in my previous posts here but although I am ashamed of them now, at least I was making them during the nights and weekends so I still had my day job to pay my bills and my food.
How much would have costed me a business training? Maybe about the same or more and I would have graduated with no experience so actually I paid myself a good training and got experience at the same time.
What people think?
I have got a lot of people asking me how I was dealing with what people think about me having this business. The answer is simple: I don't care!
I have a business who is usually managed by women for women (mainly) and most of the time I can't even pick up the phone when a customer calls because as they expect a woman to answer I get hang up on but then what? I no longer pick up the phone and they can leave a voicemail.
The funniest I have heard was people telling me I was a pimp as I was getting women to work
Let them talk, at the moment I no longer have a job, I do what I want when I want it, I even took three weeks of holidays on the other side of the planet and still made money... Why should I care if some people think I am a pimp? 😀
I just wrote that as it came. If there is more that come to mind I will add them later on.
I hope that can help some of you.
If I had to give one piece of advice to people, it would be to start now. I don't f****g care if your idea is fully ready or if you are scared or if... (put any BS you usually tell yourself and the rest of the world ) just start now and in one year time you will be happy you did.
Oh and one last point I just remembered:
Is it hard?
Hell Yes!
It is the most challenging time I have had in my life. It is a lot of risk, a lot of stress, I haven't slept more than 6 hours a night in average over the past four years but gosh is it rewarding when you start to see something you created getting off the ground, when you tell your abusive boss that you no longer need his job, when you go on holiday and check your bank account in the morning and see there is more than the night before when you went to bed. The list of pros is much longer than the list of cons so I carry on and I encourage anyone to do the same.
For those who would like to find out what I do, I guess this is easy to do on here but you would waste your time. Find something you know about and go for it don't copy something that worked for others if you don't know about it, you would fail.
Good luck in your projects and sorry for the wall of text, it was for the first birthday of my company and I had to do something special for it
I have wanted to write this post for a while already but didn't have time to do it nor did I really know how to write it but this 1st year milestone is a good opportunity to stop and look back at what has been achieved and I thought I could share with you some of the things I have learned.
Just in case some of you need more background to believe what I am about to write here, I have started my business from nothing (really nothing) and this same business is now 1 year old, I have a good team of people working for me, I just opened a second branch a couple of months ago and the business has been profitable from day 1 (no choice as I started with no money).
Investor vs starting from scratch
I have been asked many times why I have never wanted to take a loan from a bank or why I haven't looked for an investor. My answer is always the same: when you start your first business, you have 0 experience so you are very likely (or in other words you will) to make mistakes. If you get money from someone (if you ever manage to get someone to give you money when you have no experience that is), you will most likely loose it because of your mistakes.
Whereas if you start from scratch, you still have no experience but you go step by step, learn the process on the way, make a little bit of money, reinvest this little bit of money in your business. With the little experience and the little money you now have you can repeat the process a little quicker and make a little bit more money, you have now a little more experience and a little more money that you reinvest into your business... There is no risk for you as you still have your day job if you make mistake but the idea is to keep your business working in its own money. Then soon, your business is making enough money for you to quit your day job and as you are now full time on it and with more experience, you can make it grow faster and so on...
That might sound stupid but it works. That's what I have been doing during the past year and it is going well.
I would like to have my business but I can't find an idea
This has been said so many times here but it is so important and very few people seems to get it when they start.
People want to find a good idea in order to start a business. This is taking things the wrong way around.
Why would you like an idea if you are not sure you can sell it. What you want is a customer. Find your first customer and remember how you got it, then rinse and repeat the same process over and over again.
Marketing
That is where the business makes or breaks. That being said, there are so many people and company trying to take advantage of you with poor services in this field that it is ridiculous.
Among them, people who assure you they can get you on the first page of Google, people from Yell or yellow pages (whatever it is called in your country) who try to sell you paid advertising, people who want to manage your social media, newspaper (local or not) that wants to get you to advertise with them... you name it.
I now work on the basis of: If they contact you, they need you more than you them. So if I no longer accept any of their offers. If I want to go for a special marketing option, I will research it, find it and contact them.
Just a few more bullet points on marketing:
- why would you pay upfront for something you don't even know if you are going to get your money back with?
- There are a lot of ways to market and pay based on the results. Yes it does cost more money, but at least you don't pay upfront and you don't have any risk. They don't get you customers they don't get paid and the money stays in your pocket. For those who don't know what I am talking about here, I think about Groupon and alike.
- Free marketing: There are so many free ways to market your services. When I started I went straight into printing flyers, I got the few pounds I had left into that, got my flyers and spent a week walking 10 miles a day across my city putting them in letter boxes. Out of that? 2 people contacted me to make an appointment and both of them cancelled 30 min before the actual appointment. Return on investment 0 and I am not counting the time I spend walking around. Then I had no money left and sat at home thinking what I could do and focused on my facebook page. I got all my first month customers from there and it didn't cost me anything.
Customer service:
There are very few businesses that are not interacting with their customers and yet so many of them that have a crappy customer service.
Attention to details is the name of the game here. Every business will try to be give their customers a good experience but pretty much none of them (at least in this country) will go the extra mile for them.
This sounds obvious but actually this is what will get you the word of mouth you want from your customers (another free way of marketing - if not the best of them).
Always go the extra mile for your customers, this is the most important thing of all,
Hiring people:
The human resource part of the business is the one I find more challenging. And I am lucky enough to really have a good team so if this wasn't the case I don't even want to think about it.
When I hire someone, I don't care about their qualifications. Hell I am not even qualified for the business I am doing, I need to get people to work in it because I can't do it myself. OK I am lying a little here (not on the part that I am not qualified to actually work in my business tough). I do ask for their qualifications because I must have them for insurance purposes. So I ask to see them, make of copy of them and then forget about them.
What I am really interested in though is the mindset. Are they motivated enough to work like crazy with me? (I am not gonna hire someone who is here to take advantage of my hard work). Are they willing to re-learn everything they already know to work in the way I want them to? (I only hire young people who need money, they will work for the money and are still flexible enough to get trained properly. Older people think they already know how they have to work and I don't care about that, I want them to work the way I want).
So motivation and mindset is the most important for me. The first person I hired wasn't even qualified for the services we provide but she was really willing to work and make the company grow with us so we paid for her training and she has been one of our best assets so far.
Managing your team:
In my experience I have seen two ways of managing people: by fear/threat or by making them want to work with you.
Managing by fear works very well... but no in the long run.
Making people want to work with you is slower to start but you have them for longer (notice I didn't say forever )
Make your choice. In my case, I an uncapable of managing people by fear, it is not me. I respect people and I always try to give them the best I can. This means the best working conditions, the best salary I can, the best treatment I can afford etc... In return I ask for loyalty and respect. I will be nice to anyone (in my business or out in real life) but if someone disrespect me I will have no problem is smashing them into the ground and I will do it with pleasure.
Always treat your employees as the great help they should be for your business. I can't say that mine are like my kids because the age difference is too small and I don't have kids but I do treat them like my brothers and sisters.
Accountancy:
I can only talk about the UK here because I don't know how this works in other countries but my view on it is that there is too much for me to know in this domain and as I am a foreigner in this country I am even less interested in spending time chasing pennies. Some people like to do that and they don't charge too much for it, gosh make them happy and give them what they like
I will only consider hiring a finance person when the cost of the accountant will become higher than the price I would pay someone to do it internally.
Keep your costs low:
This is something that sounds easy but is actually pretty hard to do and even more so with a team of women I find.
When you start making some money then you will start thinking: maybe I could work with a better laptop, machine, system (whatever it is), or maybe now I should print branded t-shirts or mugs or...
The thing I ask myself everytime is: will this get me more customers? and if yes will this amount of extra customers pay for the investment I am making? If I can't answer yes to BOTH questions then I don't do it.
An example for me, as I am a service provider, I could do with a receptionist. But I can't afford to hire a non-productive person (Hell I am already here for that ) so what do I do? I lock the door of the shop when my people are all busy inside with customers and put a sign explaining that the shop is actually open and explaining the reasons why the door is locked and the time we will unlock it. I also give them the possibility to book themselves in online on our website or to leave us a voicemail or an email. People now know that and although we might miss out on a few walk-ins, 98% of our business is on appointment and the walk-ins I miss out on wouldn't pay for a receptionist's salary.
Even more so now that I opened the second branch, the occupation rate being lower for the moment, I just made a call diversion to receive all the calls in the second branch and the person working here can manage the appointments for both places when she is not busy with customers.
Website:
Yes you need one right from the start, no it doesn't need to be perfect.
Is your business perfect from the first day you open? I guess not so it is the same for your website. And you can get the first version done yourself for free and in less than a couple of hours.
Then improve it as you go.
What if you fail?
It is not "what if" it is "what when" you fail.
You WILL fail that's for sure, but unfortunately that's how we learn.
Before I started this business, I spent three years trying about 10 different projects. I tried a lot of different things and failed on all of them. I lost three years and all added up together probably somewhere between 15 to 20 grand over this period of time between bad marketing, bad idea, getting scammed, stopping before it was even sure it wasn't going to work etc... I have made a lot of mistakes. You can see some of them in my previous posts here but although I am ashamed of them now, at least I was making them during the nights and weekends so I still had my day job to pay my bills and my food.
How much would have costed me a business training? Maybe about the same or more and I would have graduated with no experience so actually I paid myself a good training and got experience at the same time.
What people think?
I have got a lot of people asking me how I was dealing with what people think about me having this business. The answer is simple: I don't care!
I have a business who is usually managed by women for women (mainly) and most of the time I can't even pick up the phone when a customer calls because as they expect a woman to answer I get hang up on but then what? I no longer pick up the phone and they can leave a voicemail.
The funniest I have heard was people telling me I was a pimp as I was getting women to work
Let them talk, at the moment I no longer have a job, I do what I want when I want it, I even took three weeks of holidays on the other side of the planet and still made money... Why should I care if some people think I am a pimp? 😀
I just wrote that as it came. If there is more that come to mind I will add them later on.
I hope that can help some of you.
If I had to give one piece of advice to people, it would be to start now. I don't f****g care if your idea is fully ready or if you are scared or if... (put any BS you usually tell yourself and the rest of the world ) just start now and in one year time you will be happy you did.
Oh and one last point I just remembered:
Is it hard?
Hell Yes!
It is the most challenging time I have had in my life. It is a lot of risk, a lot of stress, I haven't slept more than 6 hours a night in average over the past four years but gosh is it rewarding when you start to see something you created getting off the ground, when you tell your abusive boss that you no longer need his job, when you go on holiday and check your bank account in the morning and see there is more than the night before when you went to bed. The list of pros is much longer than the list of cons so I carry on and I encourage anyone to do the same.
For those who would like to find out what I do, I guess this is easy to do on here but you would waste your time. Find something you know about and go for it don't copy something that worked for others if you don't know about it, you would fail.
Good luck in your projects and sorry for the wall of text, it was for the first birthday of my company and I had to do something special for it
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