 | I feel very fortunate to have experienced a live talk from the motivational speaker, Rob Moore. Rob’s speech stands as one of the most inspiring and educational speeches I have heard to date and I suspect will continue to do so for a long time. As Rob taught me, when you share your knowledge with others, magical things happen, so here you go. P.S. It turns out, there is a formula for success… |
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 In the blog post on Finding Business Ideas we said that buying a business is often the quickest and easiest way to become an entrepreneur. Well, like buying a house, you don’t want to pay for fancy fixtures or a fresh lick of paint. You want the cheapest house in the best area. This typically means you’ll buy something beaten up that needs loads of TLC. The same goes for businesses and so being able to execute a turnaround is a key skill.
 Start-ups are inherently vulnerable because they don't have cushy income stream propping them up or a stockpile of cash that they can dip into if things go awry. Therefore they must ensure that they are successful 90% of the time and that failures are hard and fast.
The odds are clearly against entrepreneurs so this post is dedicated to helping you avoid the most common pitfalls so that you have a fighting chance of success. 
“OK thanks for the advice on motivating my non-existent employees and optimising my theoretical product mix, but can someone please explain to me how I actually start a business!?” I have found that despite the overabundance of literature on entrepreneurship, most of it doesn’t give you much practical advice on starting a business.
In fact, the first time I launched my start-up, I had no clue what I was doing and what a learning curve it was! The process has since been demystified, so I thought I’d share...  Right, you’ve stress-tested your business idea, convinced your co-founders about this incredible new plan and drawn up some basic legal agreements. At some stage you’ll need to start thinking about expanding the team.
To be clear, we are dealing with expanding your team, not plugging the deficiencies of the founders. If you find yourself in the situation where you don’t have a co-founder to do the marketing in a consumer-focused business then...  Prior to launching your business it is advisable to get your legal house in order. Having the tough conversations now will likely save many relationships and may shave years off your retirement age! Now remember that when you start a business, everyone is positive, happy and friends. Hopefully it stays that way but...
 Today I attended the British Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (BVCA) High-Growth 2016 conference at Hilton London in Park Lane.
There were some thoroughly impressive speakers and, as I do, I took the liberty of taking some notes to share with you all.  The most valuable lesson I learned at Business School was that you do not need to personally make mistakes in order to learn that something is a bad idea. In other words, learn vicariously.
This is a seemingly simple piece of advice, however it is extremely powerful and can save you copious amounts of time and money.  Now, this is quite a lengthy blog post because there is lots to cover here but arguably it is one of the most important parts of starting a business so worth the upfront effort. Here goes!
It is probably best to write this document in a word editor and later you can convert it to something visually attractive in PowerPoint.  Ok so you want to start a business but you’re scraping the barrel for ideas. If that’s you, your thought process probably goes a bit like mine: “Come on, think!” you say to yourself. “Ok, it needs to be scalable and something that people need and makes money and is clever like an app or something cool like that… Hmmm, what about connecting people who have something to offer that others can’t find and then charge both of them a small fee and then rollout globally……
 Almost everyone you speak to has some aspiration to start a business. The reluctance to do so stems from multiple different fears, some more valid than others. Here I will hopefully provide you with some insight as to whether to start now or hold fire a little bit longer.
Let me preface this post by saying that if anyone asks me whether they should start a business or not, I invariably answer YES, so please take the no-go comments with a pinch of salt! |
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