Start your own business. Why not?
The reason many people do not set up their own business is because of the number of questions they ask themselves that are unanswerable. Questions like, Where will I work? How do I set up a legal entity? Given that you have already answered the question of what your business does, the next question is where you will get your business from. Just like any problem, the task may seem insurmountable if not approached logically and with some common sense.
About 1 1/2 years ago I along with 2 friends decided we were going to try to earn some extra cash by creating advertising campaigns. Considering we were already doing that exact job for a large network agency, we had some idea what we were doing. The first hurdle was finding clients. How do you find client’s who want to buy your intangible product? We sell ideas and we have to convince people to buy our thoughts, so the task was always going to be tough one.
The first thing we did was to sit in a cafe and write down all the names of all our friends who worked in any company or who had parents who work in a company. That meant pretty much all our friends. The list was big. We then narrowed down the list to the people that we liked and that we didn’t owe money to and to those that we generally felt comfortable approaching. After this exercise we realised that we had nothing to convince them of and that we weren’t just 3 con artists trying to get our friends to pay for thin air to fund a one way trip to the Caribbean.
The fact that all these people knew us, meant that we had some kind of standing with them already. We were speaking about advertising and our expertise from a position of authority. It is a myth that all the authority you carry as a specialist, comes from the company behind you. The company is its people. Just because you now do not work for that company, it does not mean that your expertise and experience has suddenly evaporated.
Your most valuable asset is yourself. The people you know (and you do know some people) are the first step to making use of yourself. All the other hurdles and obstacles you have to overcome to start your own business are not in fact hurdles or obstacles at all. They are in fact The Process of starting your own business. They are just tasks that should be approached like any other task. If there are questions that you think are unanswerable - then first of all, you are wrong. Second of all someone somewhere has written about the questions you are asking yourself. Just take the time to research on the internet or library and answers will be forthcoming.
Some Inspiration:
A bit about you being your biggest asset: Seth Godin’s book Linchpin. Here’s an interview with Seth on his book. Tim Ferris is interviewed in this podcast from Site Visibility as well.
Will Smith talking about the keys to life. 1 of them being that the answers are out there, so read a lot!
