Creative/Generalist

Time, in business, is money. If, like me, you run a low-margin e-commerce business and allow customers to place orders over the phone, you might seriously question whether the cost of employee time spent on taking phone orders is actually compensated by the profits those orders generate, especially when most customer calls seem to go a little something like this…

J (Me): “Good morning, how can I help?”

(The voice on the other end is quiet, wheezy, crackly and nervous – a gentleman of advancing years who may have already had two gin-and-tonics by 11am.)

C(ustomer): “Is that the sausage people?”  

J: “Um, yes, we do sell sausages. How can I help you?”  

C: “Excuse me?”  

J: “How can I help you?”  

C: “Meat stew?”  

J: “HOW CAN I HELP YOU?”  

C: “Oh yes, my wife was on your pages thing last night and she’s asked me to call you to order one of your chorizos ‘cos it’s always quicker to speak to someone isn’t it?.”  

J: “We have 12 different types of chorizos, did she say which one?”  

C: “Say what?”  

J: “Which chorizo, we have 12.”  

C: “Ooh, dunno, better ask ‘er. Give us a second. (A deafening scream causes you to wrench the phone away from your ear). BAAARRRBBARRRAAAAH. BARRRRRRRBBBBSSSSSS. BAARRRRBBBBIE. (A quiet female voice in the distance responds). WHAT BLOODY SAUSAGE DID YOU WANT – THE BLOKE SAYS THEY’VE GOT TWELVE. (Barbara responds). She says it’s the big red one.”  

J: “They’re all big and red I’m afraid.”  

C: “What?”  

J: “That doesn’t help much, I’m going to need more details.”

(Barbara, clearly irate, forces her husband off the phone and takes over.)

C: “Look here. I don’t want any trouble. My son-in-law’s brother’s wife had them on holiday in the Canaries last year and she loved them. You should know which ones I’m talking about.”  

J: “Yes, sorry about that, do you think they might be the small cooking chorizos?”  

C: “Yes, those are the ones.”  

J: “OK. That’s fine. How many do you want?”

(Barbara has passed back to husband.)

C: “Who?”  

J: “How many packs of the chorizo do you want?”  

C: “Yes, chorizo, that’s what she said.”  

J: “HOW MANY?”  

C: “BAAAAARRRRRRRRRBBBBSSS. How many do want? (Barbs’ voice is heard in the background). Enough for 4 people.”  

J: “Well, it depends on whether you’re serving it as a starter or main course. It could be one or two packs.”  

C: “Oh god no, we only want one pack.”  

J: “OK, anything else?”

(Silence on the other end of the line. After 1 or 2 minutes waiting, it is clear that the call has been cut off. After 5 minutes, the customer calls back.)

J: “Hello, how can I help?”  

C: “Who’s that?”  

J: “This is Jonathan – you were talking to me 5 minutes ago.”  

C: “No, I was speaking to a nice young lady.”  

J: “No, you were speaking to me. Would you like to order anything else other than the chorizo?”  

C: “No.”  

J: “OK, that will be £2.99 plus £5.99 delivery.”  

C: “Oh dear. That’s terribly expensive. Can you not deliver it for free?”  

J: “I’m afraid you order is for only £2.99. We couldn’t possibly deliver it for free.”  

C: “Can I get a discount then?”  

J: “No.”  

C: “OK – let’s go ahead.”  

J: “OK – I just need to take your details. Can I have your name please?”  

C: “It’s J F W G Flanarghloughsly-Weinhartstatten”  

J: “Could you spell that?”  

C: “Spelt as said – with a double ‘t’.”  

J: “Sorry, I’m going to need you to spell it.”  

C: “What?”  

J: “Please spell it.”  

C: (Through a crackly line, customer painstakingly spells his name, whilst coughing and spluttering. He forgets where he is and starts over 3 times.)  

J: “Thank you. And your address?”  

C: “It’s in Pontllanfraith near Ystrad Mynach.”  

J: (i resist the strong temptation to gauge my eye out with a biro). “I’m going to need you to spell it please.”  

C: (Another 15 minutes of l’s and y’s, coughing and faults on the line.)  

J: “Thank you. How would you like to pay?”  

C: “Thank you. See you soon.”  

J: “No, I’m going to need you to pay for the order.”  

C: “Right, of course, let me go and get my wallet.”

(I listen to every painful wheeze as the customer retrieves his wallet from the third floor of his mansion and returns to the phone.)

J: “Can I take the card number?”  

C: “Oh the numbers are so damn small, I’m going to need my glasses. Can you just wait a minute.”

(Customer returns, painfully, to the third floor to retrieve his glasses. Ten minutes later he is back on the phone.)

J: “OK, what were those numbers?”  

C: “57 (break and crackle on the line) 743 (crackle) 4 (break) 45 (crackle)”  

J: “I’m sorry. I didn’t get that. Can we try again?”

(After 4 attempts and 15 minutes, I manage to take down all the card details)

J: “I’m sorry, that card has been rejected.”  

C: “That’s impossible, there’s plenty of money in that account. We’re seriously wealthy you know.”  

J: “I’m sure there is, but the bank has rejected it.”  

C: “Oh silly me. There are two cards stuck together here and I’ve given you the security code from another card.”  

J: “OK, so can you give me the correct security code.”  

C: “Damn, these numbers are so small. I’m going to need my other glasses.”

(15 minutes, 3 flights of stairs, wheezing and coughing)

C: “Right, let’s see. Oh bloody hell, they’ve been rubbed off. I can’t read them. This is too much bloody trouble. Can I send you a postal order?”  

J: “No, we stopped accepting them in 1984.”  

C: “What about a cheque?”  

J: “1998”  

C: “Well we’ll just have to leave it then I’m afraid. Your service is disgraceful. Good bye.”

I hate to say it, but a lot of the business advice you’re googling for is either outdated, inapplicable – or both.

Let’s face it, there’s too much advice out there these days – and yes, I am only making the problem worse. From your closest network of friends and contacts, to the furthest extremes of the net, your world is most likely populated by gurus who are more than happy to throw a constant stream of wise words your way.

In day-to-day life, choosing which advice to follow is somewhat easier than when it comes to business. Of course, there are hard decisions to be made from time to time, but gut feeling and a strong sense of morality or principle are often enough to get you through. Not so in business. The entrepreneur’s path is continually bisected by a myriad of minute technical decisions that need to be made, all of which have a potentially explosive effect on business? Sell on Amazon, or not? Increase Adwords budget, or decrease? Go with product x, or choose product y. And that’s often where so many people turn to google. Try it now – go to Google, and type in the words ‘should I’ – what suggestions do you get? Currently, for me, it’s

- Should I stay or should I go

- Should I buy an iPad

- Should I text him

- Should I upgrade to Lion

Not that it’s of any relevance, but my advice would be ‘go, yes, no and yes’ respectively.

There’s a lot of people with a lot of doubts out there, but there are more than enough ‘experts’ available to fill the gap. But what do you do when your ‘advice stream’ gets overloaded with repeating, differing and contradictory statements? How do you identify what’s most applicable to you.

I have to constantly remind myself that everyone (including me, of course) writes or speaks from their own perspective born of their own experience married with their own values.

Back when man sat around fires telling stories and eating dinosaurs, the wisdom imparted to younger generations by the elders could pretty much be accepted without question. When food is plentiful, stash some away for winter. Don’t get into fights you can’t win. When faced with bear, run in opposite direction. Life didn’t change much from year to year, and what worked a hundred years before, probably worked a hundred years later.

But now we live in a world that changes at breakneck speed. What’s here today is gone tomorrow. What worked this morning, might not work this afternoon. So beware advice that comes from ‘years of experience’ as we so often hear. It might just be outdated.

This is especially true in the internet era, when business models are being creating destroyed in a continuous, rapidly moving cycle. An entrepreneur might extol the virtues of a model that has worked well for him or her, and you might be tempted to go the same way, but ask yourself first – does this still apply?

If you read, in isolation, some of the ‘first wave’ blogs written by internet entrepreneurs who started before about 2005, you’d be inclined to think that with a little work you could be bringing in $40,000 a month just through blogging. If you read some of the stuff written over the last year or two, you might come to the conclusion that blogging is dead in the water for income generation. Before taking anything you read on the internet to heart, take a look at the post date first. I’m not saying that absolutely all advice has a sell-by date; nor that everything that was written yesterday is more useful than that written a year ago. It just pays to think about the landscape that gave rise to any particular piece, and consider whether it might have changed significantly since then.

Of course, it’s not just the passing of time that gives rise to irrelevancy. An entrepreneur, when giving advice out of experience, speaks from a singular perspective. Perhaps you operate in the same industry, with the same products, even with the same client base. But your business is ultimately yours and represents your unique combination of past decisions and future aspirations. What works for him, may not work for you. In fact, the reverse might be true, it might do your business harm.

At the end of the day, a business, at its core, is just a system to produce profits for its owner(s). Engineers define systems with formulae and algorithms, with their constants and variables. Each unique system is defined and described by a unique formula. When trying to discover the formula that describes a particular system, a good engineer will certainly look to the past and to similar systems and their underlying formulae. But he will realise that the object of his attention is unique, that he must experiment, tweak and iterate in order to discover the inputs and outputs of his system.

Each business is unique, and so is the formula that describes it.  Learn to identify the variables and separate them from the constants, the concepts and ideas that change very little as times passes.  Good customer service, proper branding, effective marketing, solid financial control – these are all concepts that have shaped businesses for decades, if not centuries, and the best advice stands the test of time and applies to the vast majority of businesses.  Variables – the combination of factors that make your business unique, are much more individual and transient.  Only you can find out what particular combination of products works for you, how much you should spend on adwords, whether you should sell on Amazon, Ebay, both or neither.  Searching for advice can help you envisage and set up the system, but the variables that have to be plugged in are yours to discover through experimentation, test, success and failure.

Take what others say with a healthy dose of skepticism. Accept the uniqueness of your business. Accept that what worked for others, even in apparently identical circumstances, won’t necessarily work for you. Experiment and find your own formula.

This is a lighthearted concept introduction and the first in a series of pieces looking at business models in the modern economy and what they mean to potential Non-9-to-5′ers. If you are an expert economist, probably best to look away now.

If you don’t know what a ‘business model’ is, join the club – nobody really does. It’s a concept that entrepreneurs and bank managers toss around casually but when it comes to the crunch, good definitions are hard to come by. That is, unless you’re a business studies professor, in which case you might say something like: “an architecture for the product, service, and information flows, a description of the benefits for the business actors involved, and a description of the sources of revenue” Got that? No? Here’s an easier way to think of it: it’s the answer to the question “How the hell are you going to make money out of that?”. Listen up.

- Hey Bob, I’ve got a brilliant idea.  

- Oh yeah?  

- Yeah, I’m going to set up a car rental agency and undercut everyone else. I’m thinking of charging £25 a day.  

- That sounds like it’d be less than cost. How the hell are you going to make money out of that?  

- Well, you see, I’m going buy loads of brand new vehicles all the time and make people sign a contract with tiny print that says they’ll have to pay £500 for every scratch on the car when they return it. Then I’ll sell the cars for a bit less than I bought them for, leaving me with a fat profit.  

- Nice.

Of course, this entirely fictitious conversation is in no way related to any practices going on in the vehicle renting industry in the UK and has nothing to do with the fact that you can rent a van for £30 a day whereas in Spain it costs £100. Seriously.

So, a business model is best thought of as how an organisation makes money doing what it does. It sometimes helps to think of businesses that look impossible on the surface and dig deeper for examples of clever or innovative business models. Or illegal ones. A knitting materials shop that is still in business today is clearly a front for something sinister.

Now the example I’ve given is clearly highly contrived, and in the old days, the question “How the hell are you going to make money out of that?” was easy to answer. “I’m going to sell it”, was the about the only option.  Most industries ticked along nicely under the assumption they would always be able to make piles of money just selling the product or service they were making or supplying.  Then the internet came along and ripped up the rule book, and the conversations now go:

- Hey Bob, I’ve got a brilliant idea.  

- Oh yeah?  

- You know those lovely wicker baskets I make? Well, I’ve decided to make it into a business.  

- Good for you. How much are you going to sell them for?  

- No, caveman, I’m going to give them away for free.  

- How the hell are you going to make money out of that then?  

- Well, I’m going to weave clues to websites into the fabric of the baskets and set up an online treasure hunt with prizes of holidays to Lanzarote.  Then, I’m going to sell timeshare companies rights to 30 minute sales pitches to the winners once they arrive.”  

- Oh.

In short, people are finding ingenious ways to make money out of virtually anything, including, in many cases, giving it away for free.  Now, I don’t know this for sure, but my feeling is that if walked into Harvard Business School or a board meeting twenty or even ten years ago and propounded this as a vision of the future, they would have sent you away for treatment. Of course, this movement is causing old school businesses to rethink the way they make money as consumers change their habits and their willingness to part with cash in the same way as before. The public face of this is often the music and film industries first trying to sue everyone, and then having to adapt to the market with innovative value propositions, like iTunes or song downloads included with GSM airtime bundles. Other businesses, and their models, will just wilt and die. Blockbuster had stores all over Spain once – now they’re gone.

The point to take away from this is that you don’t need a shop to make money. Even if what you’re selling seems wholly traditional and mundane, with just a a bit of imagination and an observant look around your sector, you can probably come up with a crazy (perhaps even profitable) way of selling it. Just think outside the box a bit.

To get your creative juices flowing, I’ll let you in on an idea I had for[my own company but will almost certainly never do. A note to competitors: if you’re reading, please have a go at this and tell me how you get on.

Right, we sell speciality food, OK? How about we sell that food at cost price (we could even scan and upload purchase invoices to show that we were being honest). This essentially amounts to what creators of knowledge are doing when giving away their product for free. “How the hell are you going to make money out of that then?”, I hear you ask. Well, as standard we’ll do 3-5 day delivery and premium number telephone support. Then we’ll offer yearly ‘Preferred Customer’ subscriptions for £100 which entitle the holder to unlimited 24 hour deliveries and unlimited freephone telephone support.

Novel and 10-years-ago-lock-you-away-in-an-institution business plans are not just for porn hawkers and bloggers, they are for the whole business community – particularly Non-9-to-5′ers who feel that ‘old’ business is inaccessible. Well, here’s your invitation. Try something new. Experiment with novel business models. Then, when people ask “How the hell do you make any money out of that?”, just keep the secret to yourself and lie – tell them you don’t.

The first half of this double post comes from a rambling, ranting conversation I had with my girlfriend in the car yesterday; the second half comes from the niggling sensation I’ve had ever since I wrote the very first post on this blog that I never quite made my intentions clear. Depending on whether you’re Gen X or Gen Y, your brain might be running out of hard drive space – mine certainly is. The more crap you read on the internet, the more secondary school French trickles out your left ear, never to be heard from again.  What will you do, monsieur, when your tire bursts on the A-10 from Tours to Biarritz, eh?  My solution to this problem is generally to construct never ending mental summaries which tend to spill forth when anyone is stupid enough to ask my opinion on, well, anything.  As time goes by and more information comes in, I adjust these miniature world views until they are compact answers to some of the world’s trickiest questions.  And so it came to pass yesterday, on the road from Leon to Burgos, after taking far too seriously what far too many people I don’t (physically) know have to say about life, the world and business, I loosely formulated my personal summary approach to world domination.  These are not really my own, original ideas, but more how I understand and conceptualise what a lot of people far more intelligent than myself are currently saying about the way the world works.

First, let me clarify what I’m talking about, and that’s business – business in the widest sense of the word.  I doesn’t matter whether it’s big or small, short or fat, charitable or selfish, employed or freelance, online or offline, full-time or part-time, legal or illegal.  We’re talking about activities that are designed to make money – the more the better.

From the millions of words that have been written about commercial success, and the thousands I’ve read, it seems to all come down to three things (which are so intertwined that they’re really just one thing):

1. If you’re a person, find a genuine niche.  If you’re are a business, find a proper Unique Selling Proposition, then…

2. Be great.  Better – be the only one, then…

3. Find an innovative, honest business model which makes big company execs cry and makes you money whilst treating your customers as human beings.

That’s it.  Really.  I’m tempted to leave it there for maximum impact, but I’d like to expand at least a little bit on each of the above points.  If you like the maximum impact idea, stop reading now and just take that little snippet away with you.

If you’re a person, find a genuine niche.  If you’re a business, find a proper Unique Selling Proposition.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll consider these concepts as one for the time being.  The question to ask is “What makes me, or my company, different?”.

The more time I spend in business, the more I realise that being different isn’t reserved for Nando’s chicken restaurants where you have to order at the counter but a server brings the food to the table (?).  Being different is your ticket out of 15-hour days, a prolonged cash flow struggle and eventual financial death.

It would be pointless for me to go into USP, niches and value propositions in any detail here as there is already an overwhelming amount written on those topic.  The ground truth is this:  if you’re considering an activity that isn’t going to make people wet themselves with excitement, even if it’s accounting, don’t bother.  If you’re already running an enterprise that isn’t doing something astoundingly different from everyone else, change – or shut down.

All the bad stuff in business comes from ignoring this most fundamental piece of advice.  And by ‘all the bad stuff’, I mean competition.  As any small business owner will tell you, being part of an over-competitive market is no fun at all – you end up slashing margins until you’re making next to nothing and spending what you do make on advertising to get noticed.  It’s a short cut to baldness, divorce and bankruptcy.

Robert Stephens of Geek Squad once said that ‘marketing is the tax you pay for being unremarkable’.  Aside from semantic quibbles, it might be the single most sit-up-and-kick-you-in-the-nuts piece of advice I’ve ever heard, and it turns out to be painfully true.  The newspapers, business press and internet are full of examples of clever businesspeople leveraging their uniqueness to get mammoth amounts of free, prime publicity.  The television news wouldn’t look twice at another new fruit smoothie on the market, but might give you 30 seconds of coverage if your USP was that you were shooting it into your customers’ mouths from the International Space Station.

The bottom line is that real uniqueness creates its own publicity and leaves you with a viable business rather than a massive AdWords bill.  

Be great.  Better – be the only one

There’s a lot of people around at the moment that want a lot of pieces of lots of pies.  The world has turned into a horribly competitive place.  The means that even if you’ve found your niche and are crystal clear about the value you are bringing that your neighbour is not, you’ve got to do it seriously well.  If the only pizza place in your town was rubbish, they might still make some money off their uniqueness.  If the only pizza place in your town had been voted one of the top five in the country…

You’ve got to be the go-to-guy (or organisation) to the exclusion of everyone else.  You don’t have time to be mediocre or even good – even being the best won’t cut it these days.  If you nail your market positioning  right, you should be the only entity worth considering for good or service x.  Of course, if you nail your niche right, nobody else should be around to stop you anyway, but to be 100% successful you’ll still need to offer an outstanding service to your clients.

Why? Because customers talk.  Not like they did back in the day when if you failed a customer, you might lose them and their immediate family, no, nowadays customers Twitter.  If you’re really crap to a single influential player, you could conceivably lose 10,000 potential customers overnight.  If you’re amazing, the reverse can happen.  If you write something mediocre, you might have 5 or 6 friends and your Mum read it.  If you write something earth-shattering and its merit takes it to the front page of Digg, 100,000 people might read it.  The connected, social world of commerce is a meritocracy the likes of which has never existed before.  If you don’t believe me, check out what Get Satisfaction are doing for customer service (and if you’re a business owner, don’t bill me for new pants).

Find an innovative, honest business model which makes big company execs cry and makes you money whilst treating your customers as human beings

Let’s not beat about the bush, most big business have made vast sums of money by treating consumers like dirt and generally ripping them off wherever possible.  We’re so used to it we’re immune.  It’s what we expect.

But anyone who spends any time on the web must have noticed that things are slowly changing for the better.  Look around the trend-setters and you’ll get a good feel for what it means to treat customers as human beings: clear, honest product descriptions written in every day language, no misleading offers, no long-term contracts or tie-ins, no small print, no extortionate pricing.  You might have to look hard for companies doing this sort of thing right now, but you can bet your arm that everyone will be doing it five years from now.  Terms and conditions will be ditched in favour of more human agreements, like the Company-Customer pact.  ‘Offer Subject to Conditions’ will be a thing of the past.

As usual, the web croud are light years ahead of everyone else on this.  Bloggers have already embraced hyper-honesty.  In times past, blogs were full of links which took you to places to buy stuff if you inadvertently clicked on them thinking they might give you some extra info.  Nowadays, bloggers routinely include disclaimers about affiliate links, often disclosing just how much they will earn should you buy something via their site.  Why do they do this?  Because it turns out that deliberately but subtly misleading people to make a sale really annoys them. When confronted with a bit of good, old-fashioned honesty, they’re more like to go for the product.  I came across a currency exchange company recently that proclaimed total transparency.  They would show you the price they were buying the currency at for any trade you asked for and would then show you exactly how much they were making out of the deal.  Madness?  Of course, you might be turned off to know how much they are making out of you and run a mile.  That’s probably why almost nobody is doing this yet.  If they’re charging a fair price though, isn’t it more likely that you’ll appreciate their honesty and transparency and probably consider that the minimal fee they’re charging you is fair dues for a unique and excellent (remember?) service.

Being honest and transparent, means you can’t hide behind a rip-off business model which is going to make you insanely rich on the back of little work or talent.  An 800% markup won’t cut it anymore.

Let’s be realistic for a minute.  Out of the hundreds of would-be-entrepreneurs who quit their day job each week, all but a tiny percentage will be back at the office doing 9-to-5 before a year’s out.  The statistics speak for themselves – something like 90% of all small business are gone within 12 months, out of those that remain, the second year failure rate is similar, and even then, out of the remaining group, the five year failure rate is comparable.

Why on earth do so many small businesses fail so quickly?  Are good business ideas really that hard to come by?  In fact, viable ideas are almost certainly nothing to with the problem.  Success, after all, is often in the implementation, and an average idea, bought to life by a a truly talented team, can trump even the most groundbreaking innovation where the realisation is weak.  The fact is that so many small business founders are just not honest with themselves about what it takes to successfully realise their dreams.  Making money from an idea is hard, but being truly brutal in your own self-assessment is even harder.  Really now, who wants to admit that they probably don’t have the numerical skills to understand pricing or cash flow?  Who could imagine their business failing because their marriage just couldn’t stand up to the strains of debt?  So the first instinct is to just jump in, thinking “I’ll deal with whatever problems arise later”.  Far better, surely, to be honest with yourself from the outset. Do you really have what it takes to start your own business?

This is my rundown of what I think are the key attributes needed if you really want to be a successful small business owner.  Of course, by ‘small business’, I’m referring to ‘Say No! to the Office’-type small businesses – modern, flexible, possibly location-independent, possibly little to zero startup capital, innovative business model etc.  For other types of business, not all of these may apply.  By ‘successful’, I’m talking about getting going and just surviving, not necessarily bringing home truckloads of cash within six months.  There’s a lot of luck in business, but luck favours the bold and, without a doubt, those that have the skills to bring luck onto their side.

Are you multitalented?  Are you smart enough to learn, literally, anything?

For me, and for the types of businesses I have been involved in, this is the number one.

Starting and running a small business demands a range of skills so vast and varied that you cannot possibly imagine what you are getting into until you’re into it.

Some might say that the only skill you really need is the ability to find, bring into your business, and manage people with the right abilities, rather than actually having any yourself.  Perhaps many even start out with that very idea.  For me though, that’s the approach of someone with a limited skillset and an even more limited ability to acquire new skills.  Your new idea isn’t a middle-management company, is it?  At the beginning, when money is limited, or worse still, non-existent, you’re probably not going to have the resources to find people to take care of every little task that’s outside your field of expertise.  Even if you do have access to that much cash, how can you expect to effectively monitor and guide what your team are doing without understanding it yourself?

The truth is, being multitalented by nature is a massive advantage in startup business.  Many people, either consciously or subconsciously, bracket themselves as ‘creative’, ‘numerical’, ‘artsy’, ‘non-technical’, ‘logical’, ‘scientific’, etc., and then put up barriers to anything which falls outside the definition of what they consider themselves to be.  Those are the people I have seen struggle or fail quickly.  Help is either slow or expensive – if you want real success, you’re going to have to depend on yourself, and if you don’t know how to do something at first, you’re going to have to learn.  Be honest with yourself – are you strongly right-brain, or left-brain dominant?  Do you struggle to acquire creative, or conversely, technical skills?  Or are you a polyglot, able to turn your hand to almost anything?  Test yourself – how do you feel about learning 80-100% of the following?

Business and Entrepreneurial

- Banking

- Book-Keeping and Accounting

- Small Business Technical and Legal

- Business Communications – Phone/Email/Fax

- IT Systems and Solutions for Business

- Market/Competitor Research

- Business Processes/Management/Productivity

- Logistics/Warehousing

- Personnel Management

Web Design

- HTML, CSS

- Javascript, PHP

- Web Graphics, Buttons, etc.

- SEO, Website Optimisation, Google, Yahoo, Sitemaps

- WordPress, Blogger, Ebay & Other Template Based Design

Graphic Design

- Photography, Photo Editing

- Logo and Brand Graphics Design

Software, Hardware and Programming

- System Set Up and Configuration

- Email/Web/Applications Configuration

- Microsoft Office Applications

- Adobe Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator, Acrobat

- Javascript, PHP

Online Marketing

- Ebay, Amazon, Google, Shopping Portals

- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

- Adwords, Pay-per-Click Advertising

- Affiliate Programs

- Website Optimization, Promotions etc.

- RSS, Blogs, Feeds

- Social Networking, Facebook, Forums

- WordPress, Blogger, Feedburner

- Google Analytics

Offline marketing and Sales

- Leaflet, Flyer, Printed Material Design

- Catalogue Design

- Sales Agents

Writing

- Web Copy

- Proof Reading

- Product Description

- Press Releases, Articles, Reports, Blog Posts

And that’s probably only scratching the surface.  If you’re coming from a non-commercial background, chances are you’ll have almost none of the above knowledge to start with.  That’s OK, as long as you’re able to acquire it quickly.  The opportunities and resources for teaching yourself just about anything are virtually limitless these days – just hit Google or Youtube with the topic you need to learn about for an endless stream of information.  Think about how you have approached learning new skills in the past.  Have you been frightened off?  Or have you successfully applied your intelligence to new fields?

Luckily, most people will never be able to take advantage of this torrent of learning.  We are educated to be specialists, not generalists.  If you are truly multitalented, that works to your advantage.  Those are the barriers to entry that you will overcome and others will not.

Are you persistent? Will you survive ‘the dip’?

I’ve referred to ‘the dip’ before.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, pick up a copy of the book and read it now.

It’s unlikely your business will work straight away.  In fact, it’s probably going to take a number of years before you really start seeing the fruit of your labour.  At some point into its growth and development, you’re going to hit a dip – a point in time where the initial motivation that kept you up all night designing logos is a fading, distant memory, yet the shining light of success, profit and perhaps even fame are so far in the distance that you can’t even imagine them yet, let alone see them.

Luckily, at this point most people quit.

Will you?  That’s what you need to establish before you even start.  Getting into the dip mindset is almost impossible – that’s why so many people start out blindly on a journey they were never, ever going to finish.  You can’t feel those feelings of despair and distress until you are up to your eyeballs in workload, bogged down in cashflow issues or debt, and facing one customer complaint after another.  That’s the nature of the beast.  You tell yourself that you’ll never be in that situation.  But you will.  You’ll tell yourself that even if you do get into that situation, you will be strong enough to pull through.  Be realistic.  Will you?  Most people don’t.  Getting through the dip takes more motivation, self-control and patience than most people can ever muster.  That’s another barrier to entry that stops the market getting flooded.  Not everyone is cut out for this.  So, you can fool yourself into thinking you’ve got the staying power – but wouldn’t it be better to consider whether you really do before wasting your time.  Look back at your past endeavours.  Have you done anything to suggest you won’t drop out at the first sign of trouble?  Have you achieved something that took extraordinary commitment in the face of strong pressure to quit?

The worst case scenario is that you waste a load of time, effort and money getting to the dip, only to quit when you get there.  Save yourself a lot of pain by only starting projects you are sure you can persist at, no matter what.

Are you patient?

Even if you don’t hit a strong dip, it may take a lot longer than you think to produce the kind of results you want.  If you plan for the business to be fully functional, perhaps even paying you a wage, within a year, what will you do if it takes two, three or even five years?

Even some of the best businesses, with outstanding implementation, still need time to find their niche in the marketplace, develop a strong customer base, and to gain the sort of momentum that propels them forward without the constant grind typically needed to push a startup along.  Perhaps yours is the type of business that gathers pace quickly, but in my experience, most startups are relatively slow-burners and thus their success is mainly limited by the owner’s patience.

When you find that your business is plodding along at a much slower pace than you expected, how will you react?  Are you impatient by nature?  Will you soon be looking for other avenues to explore rather than consolidating what you have?

Are you resilient?

I have never encountered the quantity and degree of obstacles, barriers and problems as I have whilst growing my small-business.  Sometimes I have felt like there was no solution, sometimes I have felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall and a lot of the time I have felt like throwing the towel in.

In the second year of trading with my food import company, we had outgrown the small storage unit from which we were trading and desperately needed more space.  We weren’t able to hold the levels of stock we needed to, which meant we were constantly letting customers down and more often than not, losing customers due to our inability to consistently provide what they needed.  We were, however, still small and not yet profitable, and really needed to find somewhere on a shoestring budget.  I have never encountered such a large obstacle to progress in my life.  We searched for months on end.  We almost quit.  When we finally found somewhere, it took 9 months to get the contracts sorted and move in.  It almost killed the business.  I can’t even begin to describe how close we were to losing it all.  But for some crazy reason we held on.

Business, for me, has often been like that.  I have encountered problems to which I had come to the conclusion that there was no solution, only to find that with time, luck and hard work, one does eventually come along.  At first, I was knocked back by each and every problem we encountered.  It seemed so impossible to progress.  It seemed what we were trying to do just couldn’t be done.  But as time has gone by, I have grown better at standing up to problems, at finding solutions, at being more resilient.

How resilient are you?  Do you have a defeatist personality?  Is the first, fifth, or hundredth problem or barrier likely to kill your business? Or can you turn a problem on its head, find a solution and move on?

Is your life flexible enough to adapt to your new business for an unpredictable length of time?

It’s not only your patience that’s going to be tested as your business takes time to grow and develop – your life, too, will feel the strain.  Relationships, kids, personal finances and social life are all likely to influence whether your business will succeed or flop.

It’s hard to imagine what a drain on your resources setting up a new business can be.  You are likely going to devote a huge portion of your available time, money, effort and love to your new project, and these are resources that won’t be available elsewhere and for others.

If there are others in your circle that depend on you – a partner, children, relations, friends – they are going to lose a large part of you for an unspecified period of time.  Do you think they can cope with that?  Or is it likely to cause tensions so strong that they threaten the development of the business?

Think practically – are your finances in a good state?  Can you afford to live for perhaps three years without a solid source of income?  Do you have another source of income?  Is your partner’s income large enough to support your family until the business is ready to pay its way.  You could bet on your business paying within a certain time frame, but what if that time comes and the business is not profitable yet, or not profitable enough.  Being forced by personal circumstances to leach money out of a business that is not yet ready to pay a salary is a sure recipe for cash flow trouble.

Personal circumstances can do more that put financial pressure on a budding business.  If both your life and business demand a greater amount of time than the sum total you have available, at least one, if not both, are going to suffer.  Make sure you are realistic about the personal resources you have available to devote to your project.  Don’t underestimate the investment that you are going to have to make, only to find six months down the line that your life doesn’t, in fact, permit you as much flexibility as you thought.

Stability and comfort is also a key factor.  I have seen friends really struggle with early stage businesses because of instability in their personal circumstances, such as:

- Unstable, volatile relationship with partner.

- Unstable finances.  No reliable source of income.  Constant unexpected expenses. No backup funds.

- Nowhere stable to live. Constantly moving from flat to flat.

- Nowhere comfortable to work.

- Insufficient physical resources.  E.g., no car, no computer.

None of these are limiting factors.  Of course you can start a business without a car.  But with all the difficulties you are likely to face anyway, wouldn’t it be easier if you could rely on yourself to get from meeting to meeting, rather than having to wait for the bus?  Of course you can start a business without a stable place to live and work.  But you’re going to be putting in mammoth work sessions at the beginning, and aren’t you going to be more comfortable and motivated to continue if you have a suitable, dedicated workspace?

As my own personal life has become more comfortable and stable throughout the development of my business, I have found it easier and easier to leverage my environment to produce better, more professional results.

 Do you have what it takes to start your own business?  Ask yourself the following questions and, above all, be realistic with yourself.  Wasting a load of resources and time on a project that’s never going to go anywhere is worse than not starting at all.

• Do I posses a wide range of skills? Am I able to learn new skills relatively easily and quickly?
• Am I a quitter? Do I have the staying power to work through the dip when times seem rough?
• Do I have the patience to see the project through, even if it takes much longer than expected?
• Do I have a strong, resilient personality? Enough to deal with the extreme difficulties business will throw at me?
•  Can my life, my loved ones and my personal circumstances deal with the investment?