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Breadcrumbs... 1 year in business and 3 years on the forum

Roland

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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:
  • 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? :D

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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firmwear

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Congratulations!

And great post, informative yet very entertaining. :)
 

Bigguns50

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CONGRATULATIONS !! And thank you for the insights. Rock on !
 

shubham525

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Congratzzz !!

Yes I completely agree with starting with no money , we learn and earn as we progress.
 
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Andy Black

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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:
- 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 receptionnist'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? :D

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 slep 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 :)
Nice write up. Thanks for taking the time to do this.
 

MJ DeMarco

I followed the science; all I found was money.
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Congratulations and thank you for posting your experience.

I've marked this NOTABLE -- I've also took the liberty to edit the post for readability.

Thanks!
 

Roland

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Some more breadcrumbs:

Trademark:
Before I start on this topic, I just would like to say that this might be different in the US. I have only dealt with the UK intellectual property office so far.
Registering a trademark is only a part of the process for me as it was something I needed to achieve for what I had in mind.
The process is pretty straight forward: you decide what you want to protect and make the application.
In the UK there are two different ways of doing it:

1- You pay the complete fee in one go and you take the risk of loosing it if the application is rejected.

2- You pay 50% of the fee to start with and once you get the initial report and the acceptation of the application then you pay the remainder.

While the second option is obviously safer, it is a little bit more expensive.

The price of the application depends on two things:

1- The number of logos, catch phrases etc... that you want to register

2- The number of classes you want to register them in.

The classes will define what sort of use you plan to give to your trademark. For example, your brand could be a product brand, a training supplier brand and a service supplier brand. These are three different classes and you have to pay an extra for each one of them. The first one is included in the basic fee.

Once you have paid and sent your application, the intellectual property office will come back to you within 2 to 3 weeks with an initial report. Basically they will do the same research you should have done before you applied and come back to you telling you if there are other trademarks yours is competing against.

Most of the time even if there are other trademarks existing, they won't reject your application but they will have to let the owner of the other trademarks know that you are trying to register something that is conflicting with their trademark. The big risk being that these owner could come back to you and ask for compensation for having used their trademarks even before you applied for it.
Something else that is useful to know is that even if there are other trademarks that your application is conflicting with, the intellectual property office will only advise the owner if these trademarks have been registered in the same territory. So let's say you register your brand in the UK and there is a similar brand in the US, they will let you know that there is something your application is conflicting with but that they won't make the owners aware of it.

Anyway once you have received this first report, you pay the remaining 50% of the fees and from this moment, your application will be officially and publicly published and anyone has three months to oppose to it. If there is an opposition made, then it goes into negotiation and different ways of doing that can be used but I have not had to deal with this so I won't talk about it.

And if nobody has opposed to your application at the end of the 3 months, then within 2 weeks, you will receive the official paperwork stating that you officially own the trademark and can take legal actions in court against people using it.

A lot of companies are selling services to help companies register their trademarks. In my experience, it is easy enough to be done on your own and it will save you a great deal of money. You can always call the intellectual property office at anytime during the process if you have any question.

Franchising:
Franchising wasn't an option I was really keen on considering mainly because of my ignorance on this subject so I am going to try and tackle some of the misconceived ideas I had about franchising.

- Franchising is unaffordable for small businesses
- You can't do it yourself
- It takes a lot of time
- You need to have a big network to find your first franchisees

To start with, it would be good to explain why franchising could be a good option. Initially when I started my business, I wanted to keep branching out as I had done in the first two years. But I quickly realized that this wasn't a viable option. It is slow and it requires a huge investment on my side both in terms of money and time.
By franchising my business, I give people the opportunity to make money for themselves and use a business model that has been tested and proved to be working well. On my side, I can grow the company much faster without having to invest my own money in each branch.

It is right that setting up a franchise can be expensive if you consider the prices some law firms are charging. The first law firm I called tried to make me think that they weren't dealing with franchise stuff after they asked me what size my company was. They didn't know what to answer and hung up on me when I told them that maybe they should have their website amended because it was clearly stating that they were providing this sort of services.

Anyway, this is where a good network is important. Someone I know knew about someone who had done it for a business much smaller than mine and agreed to put us in contact. I got some more details from this person about franchising and was referred to a law firm.
I contacted them and within a week was meeting them for a first chat.

There are 4 steps to setting up a franchise:

1- The pilot: or in other words, is your business franchisable? If not, then find alternative to franchising and if yes move on to step 2.

2- The franchise development plan. This is the organisation of your franchise, how it is going to be design and how it is going to work.

3- The franchise offer : self explanatory

4- The implementation

The only part that you can't do by yourself is the legal part of it. In theory you could but if you don't have a background dealing with lawstuff, I would strongly advise against it as it could very easily get you into trouble. So having a good lawfirm to make an airtight franchise agreement is mandatory from my point of view but all the rest you can do yourself.

And if you think about it, it makes more sense to do the rest yourself. Who better than yourself can write down how your company has to be operated to be successful? Why would I pay someone to write down how to operate my company, how to train my franchisees? I would have to explain everything to this person so that he/she could understand and write it down. I might as well write it down myself directly.

Marketing a franchise offer
This is probably the most complicated thing to do. Sometimes I wish I could have a better network to make things easier and faster but even without a perfect network, it is still possible to get a lot of interest. The main thing is to make your offer a win for everybody.

This is something that has been said many times on this forum but I think it cannot be stressed enough. If you make anything you do a win-win kind of deal then you shouldn't have any problem in finding customers. This is the way I deal with potential franchisees, with my employees, with my suppliers, etc... everything should be balanced otherwise it is not viable in the long run.

So to sum this up, franchising is definitely a good option to consider for some type of businesses and it is also not as complicated as some people would like to make it look.

If you have any question, don't hesitate to fire away, I will try my best to answer them.
 
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rpeck90

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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:
  • 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? :D

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 :)

Congrats, I tried selling women's products one time too, same issue.

Women will listen to you but will silently go and buy from someone else if they don't respect you. Same with men actually, they want a proven expert, women want someone who "understands".

Anyway, I have a question - you mentioned your past forays - what was the catalyst that drove you to this business?

Thanks for the insight!
 

Roland

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My wife! :rofl:

It sounds funny but it is almost the truth.
My wife is from a country where you don't work in what you want but you work in what gives you money to pay for your next meal. When we got to live together in my country after a few years of bureaucracy fighting, she had to train again to be able to work because her foreign degrees were not recognized so naturally she trained in what she knew how to do and at the end of one year of training, the boss of the company she did her apprenticeship in told her that she could have a job in the company but that she shouldn't expect to work on the machines because she was a woman.

My wife resigned on the spot and when she got home that night she started saying that she might have made a mistake and wondered what she was going to do.
At that time I was still an employee and my salary was comfortable enough for the two of us to live on so I told her that she should do what she had always wanted to do. And she said that she wanted to be a beauty therapist.
I didn't know anything about beauty apart from the fact that there are salons everywhere so I told her OK but you must be the best at it otherwise it is not worth it but if she managed to be the best at it then I would one day give her a salon of her own.
By being the best at it, I meant that she needed to train and make her experience in the best places. We found the best private beauty school and as the training was only starting four months down the line she took a cleaning job in a restaurant to make money and be able to afford the very expensive training and at the end of the four months, she had some money to pay for her training and I completed from my savings for what was still missing.
At that time she was just starting to speak my language so training in a foreign language was rather difficult so we spent every night studying together.

When came the time of actually working, we made the list of the best places for this specific industry in my country. One of them was only two hours away from where we lived so we made a list of all the salons of the city, I took a day off and drove her there.

When we got there, I went straight to the best place of the list thinking that there was no chance she could get a job there so that it would be a good training for her. So in she went and 30 minutes later she came out saying that she had gotten a job on the basis that she arrived at a time that was convenient for them (after the opening rush and before the midday rush) and on her smile. We spent the rest of the day on the beach :)

A few months later, she had the opportunity to go to Paris for a beauty exhibition so I thought that if she wanted to be in the most exclusive place in the country, it had to be in a salon on the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris so I told her to take some CVs and go and try to get a job in any of them.

Note that at that time I wasn't even thinking about having a business for her, just trying to help her build a good CV. But anyway, she went there and after half a day called me saying that she had gotten a job in one of the salons in the most exclusive avenue of the country. A friend on our wedding day said in his speech that she was one of these people who achieve things because they don't know that it is impossible...

In the meantime, I had wanted to go abroad for a while and there was one particular company that I wanted to work for but they always rejected my applications so being tired of it, I found the phone number of the HR director and called her, the conversation went something like this:
- Hi, I am calling you because I sent you a CV and a cover letter three weeks ago and didn't hear back, could you give me an update please?
- I don't know, we receive a lot of them, can you give me your name?
So I gave her my name and she went to look into her papers. After a while she came back saying that she could find anything on my name which wasn't surprising as I hadn't sent anything :)
- I am sorry, we might have lost it.
- OK no worries, so what can we do?
- Well, maybe you could tell me what you are looking for?
So I told her what I wanted and what I was capable of doing.
- Oh actually we have just opened a new department in xxx and we are looking for someone to do xxx, would that be of interest to you?
- Yes of course
- OK then let me talk to the director of the department and I will come back to you.
15 minutes later, she called me back saying that she had met him in the hallway and told him about me. She also said that I had a phone interview the day after and if the director was happy with me then I had the job.

I had the job interview, it went well and just like that I got the job I wanted without applying for it. :)

Then I moved to the UK and started to work for my job and use my evenings and weekends to develop something that I could convert into a business. It is more or less at this moment that I found MJ's book but although the principles stated were a complete eye-opener to me, it still took me almost three years to get something to work.

I tried a lot of different things (writing a book, selling stock management systems, private property CCTV systems, websites, you name it I have tried it and failed it). I have spent roughly 20 grand in 2 years on things that didn't work, I got scammed on alibaba, I hired people who didn't work, I paid for advertising when my product was not sellable... At some point I had to steal food because I couldn't afford to buy my own. I met the owner of the place at a shooting range several times after that by coincidence and ended up telling him the story, we are good friends now although the shooting range might not have been the wiser of the place to tell him this story :)

Anyway three years after having moved abroad, my contract ended and I ended up jobless. But this time instead of looking for another job I thought that this was the time to comply with my promise and give my wife a beauty salon.

In five years, I had taken her to two different countries and she had had to learn the language from scratch each time and work her way to the point where she could find a job in what she wanted so I thought that she had more than earned it.

And this is what got me into this business. As you can see, not really a catalyst but a rather long process.

If someone had told me three years ago that I would be owning three beauty related businesses I would have laughed but actually it works for me as well because I built it for her and as she is not really interested in the business management side of it, she has her salon and on my side, I grow the business and make it work for me. We are a good team :)
 

Duane

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Great post.

When I first started browsing this forum so long ago, I always thought to myself "why does everyone say if you can't pay cash for it, don't get it." I've realized this now by watching and listening from other peoples failures.

Debt is a terrible enemy for anyone in the startup area cause if your startup fails, you are royally screwed and unable to pay these debts. Even if you have a successful business, if it crashes and burns and you just bought that nice $90k car on a loan, you're screwed cause that car isn't worth what you still owe on it.
 
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rpeck90

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My wife! :rofl:

It sounds funny but it is almost the truth.
My wife is from a country where you don't work in what you want but you work in what gives you money to pay for your next meal. When we got to live together in my country after a few years of bureaucracy fighting, she had to train again to be able to work because her foreign degrees were not recognized so naturally she trained in what she knew how to do and at the end of one year of training, the boss of the company she did her apprenticeship in told her that she could have a job in the company but that she shouldn't expect to work on the machines because she was a woman.

My wife resigned on the spot and when she got home that night she started saying that she might have made a mistake and wondered what she was going to do.
At that time I was still an employee and my salary was comfortable enough for the two of us to live on so I told her that she should do what she had always wanted to do. And she said that she wanted to be a beauty therapist.
I didn't know anything about beauty apart from the fact that there are salons everywhere so I told her OK but you must be the best at it otherwise it is not worth it but if she managed to be the best at it then I would one day give her a salon of her own.
By being the best at it, I meant that she needed to train and make her experience in the best places. We found the best private beauty school and as the training was only starting four months down the line she took a cleaning job in a restaurant to make money and be able to afford the very expensive training and at the end of the four months, she had some money to pay for her training and I completed from my savings for what was still missing.
At that time she was just starting to speak my language so training in a foreign language was rather difficult so we spent every night studying together.

When came the time of actually working, we made the list of the best places for this specific industry in my country. One of them was only two hours away from where we lived so we made a list of all the salons of the city, I took a day off and drove her there.

When we got there, I went straight to the best place of the list thinking that there was no chance she could get a job there so that it would be a good training for her. So in she went and 30 minutes later she came out saying that she had gotten a job on the basis that she arrived at a time that was convenient for them (after the opening rush and before the midday rush) and on her smile. We spent the rest of the day on the beach :)

A few months later, she had the opportunity to go to Paris for a beauty exhibition so I thought that if she wanted to be in the most exclusive place in the country, it had to be in a salon on the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris so I told her to take some CVs and go and try to get a job in any of them.

Note that at that time I wasn't even thinking about having a business for her, just trying to help her build a good CV. But anyway, she went there and after half a day called me saying that she had gotten a job in one of the salons in the most exclusive avenue of the country. A friend on our wedding day said in his speech that she was one of these people who achieve things because they don't know that it is impossible...

In the meantime, I had wanted to go abroad for a while and there was one particular company that I wanted to work for but they always rejected my applications so being tired of it, I found the phone number of the HR director and called her, the conversation went something like this:
- Hi, I am calling you because I sent you a CV and a cover letter three weeks ago and didn't hear back, could you give me an update please?
- I don't know, we receive a lot of them, can you give me your name?
So I gave her my name and she went to look into her papers. After a while she came back saying that she could find anything on my name which wasn't surprising as I hadn't sent anything :)
- I am sorry, we might have lost it.
- OK no worries, so what can we do?
- Well, maybe you could tell me what you are looking for?
So I told her what I wanted and what I was capable of doing.
- Oh actually we have just opened a new department in xxx and we are looking for someone to do xxx, would that be of interest to you?
- Yes of course
- OK then let me talk to the director of the department and I will come back to you.
15 minutes later, she called me back saying that she had met him in the hallway and told him about me. She also said that I had a phone interview the day after and if the director was happy with me then I had the job.

I had the job interview, it went well and just like that I got the job I wanted without applying for it. :)

Then I moved to the UK and started to work for my job and use my evenings and weekends to develop something that I could convert into a business. It is more or less at this moment that I found MJ's book but although the principles stated were a complete eye-opener to me, it still took me almost three years to get something to work.

I tried a lot of different things (writing a book, selling stock management systems, private property CCTV systems, websites, you name it I have tried it and failed it). I have spent roughly 20 grand in 2 years on things that didn't work, I got scammed on alibaba, I hired people who didn't work, I paid for advertising when my product was not sellable... At some point I had to steal food because I couldn't afford to buy my own. I met the owner of the place at a shooting range several times after that by coincidence and ended up telling him the story, we are good friends now although the shooting range might not have been the wiser of the place to tell him this story :)

Anyway three years after having moved abroad, my contract ended and I ended up jobless. But this time instead of looking for another job I thought that this was the time to comply with my promise and give my wife a beauty salon.

In five years, I had taken her to two different countries and she had had to learn the language from scratch each time and work her way to the point where she could find a job in what she wanted so I thought that she had more than earned it.

And this is what got me into this business. As you can see, not really a catalyst but a rather long process.

If someone had told me three years ago that I would be owning three beauty related businesses I would have laughed but actually it works for me as well because I built it for her and as she is not really interested in the business management side of it, she has her salon and on my side, I grow the business and make it work for me. We are a good team :)

Very nice, I guess your wife is Asian and you're French, right?

Getting a job on the Champs Elysees is a great thing, which company was it?

Since you're in the UK, I found something important with beauty salons -- the women who run them are what make it work. I suppose you could say that about any business, but it's especially true with beauty. Whereas - as a guy - I will ruthlessly seek out the best, most women will just go with people they like (as evidenced by how your wife got her first job). In some cases, just talking to them about their cat or dumbass kid can make all the difference. Most women are 150% guided by emotion and make decisions based on feeling without thinking about consequences (merkel).

A cool fact about cost saving - I went to Paris for an art show some time ago. To save on hotel room prices, I didn't even get a hotel the last day, I figured I would go and walk around Paris instead. I went to the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triumph and des invalides without any crowds...

00c814e82429b0bf2aa02b66e9483ef6.jpg
e001f39ebf5626bcee722c98ac411262.jpg
69d8062242f7ea282f0dcb10376358a6.jpg
 

PureA

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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.

Love this.
However I would change one thing.

"You WILL fail that's for sure, but unfortunately that's how we learn"
 

Roland

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Love this.
However I would change one thing.
"You WILL fail that's for sure, but unfortunately that's how we learn"

Well if you like to fail, can you fail for me please? Because I hate it (even if it is part of the process) :)
 
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PureA

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Well if you like to fail, can you fail for me please? Because I hate it (even if it is part of the process) :)

That's what i mean! Failing would suck pretty bad if it was just that in isolation.

But with every failure hopefully you learn a lesson or 5...
 

Lex Love

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Franchising:
Franchising wasn't an option I was really keen on considering mainly because of my ignorance on this subject so I am going to try and tackle some of the misconceived ideas I had about franchising.

- Franchising is unaffordable for small businesses
- You can't do it yourself
- It takes a lot of time
- You need to have a big network to find your first franchisees

To start with, it would be good to explain why franchising could be a good option. Initially when I started my business, I wanted to keep branching out as I had done in the first two years. But I quickly realized that this wasn't a viable option. It is slow and it requires a huge investment on my side both in terms of money and time.
By franchising my business, I give people the opportunity to make money for themselves and use a business model that has been tested and proved to be working well. On my side, I can grow the company much faster without having to invest my own money in each branch.

It is right that setting up a franchise can be expensive if you consider the prices some law firms are charging. The first law firm I called tried to make me think that they weren't dealing with franchise stuff after they asked me what size my company was. They didn't know what to answer and hung up on me when I told them that maybe they should have their website amended because it was clearly stating that they were providing this sort of services.

Anyway, this is where a good network is important. Someone I know knew about someone who had done it for a business much smaller than mine and agreed to put us in contact. I got some more details from this person about franchising and was referred to a law firm.
I contacted them and within a week was meeting them for a first chat.

There are 4 steps to setting up a franchise:

1- The pilot: or in other words, is your business franchisable? If not, then find alternative to franchising and if yes move on to step 2.

2- The franchise development plan. This is the organisation of your franchise, how it is going to be design and how it is going to work.

3- The franchise offer : self explanatory

4- The implementation

The only part that you can't do by yourself is the legal part of it. In theory you could but if you don't have a background dealing with lawstuff, I would strongly advise against it as it could very easily get you into trouble. So having a good lawfirm to make an airtight franchise agreement is mandatory from my point of view but all the rest you can do yourself.

And if you think about it, it makes more sense to do the rest yourself. Who better than yourself can write down how your company has to be operated to be successful? Why would I pay someone to write down how to operate my company, how to train my franchisees? I would have to explain everything to this person so that he/she could understand and write it down. I might as well write it down myself directly.

Marketing a franchise offer
This is probably the most complicated thing to do. Sometimes I wish I could have a better network to make things easier and faster but even without a perfect network, it is still possible to get a lot of interest. The main thing is to make your offer a win for everybody.

This is something that has been said many times on this forum but I think it cannot be stressed enough. If you make anything you do a win-win kind of deal then you shouldn't have any problem in finding customers. This is the way I deal with potential franchisees, with my employees, with my suppliers, etc... everything should be balanced otherwise it is not viable in the long run.

So to sum this up, franchising is definitely a good option to consider for some type of businesses and it is also not as complicated as some people would like to make it look.

If you have any question, don't hesitate to fire away, I will try my best to answer them.


Thank you for this. My business idea requires franchising to separate it from my time. This insight is very valuable
 

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