Been working with a new start-up recently. The customer, who is a well put-together, determined and super-duper good guy, has decided, like many of us, to give his own abilities and skills an opportunity to flourish, after an unfortunate (but perhaps pre-destined) redundancy at a large corporate.
In my own experience … starting a new business in this big scary world is a heck of a scary process for many of us. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed thinking of names, and colour schemes, and ideas for logos and designs… I enjoyed looking at potential customers, and dreamed huge dreams of where I’d love to be one day. Those dreams never stop. But there had to be a time where I learnt how to balance dream and reality in order to:
The only thing I was able to relate starting a new business to, was planning our wedding.
It was a fantastic day, our wedding day. Filled with sunshine, and bunting, fancy little tea cakes, and the best South African bubbly that we could afford. Filled with special friends and family and a DJ that played every whimsical song we loved, including the Airwolf TV Theme song. (Don’t ask).
Getting to that point, though, was not as idyllic. At the very early beginning of my planning phase, the very mention of the word “WEDDING”, seemed to automatically add an extra £100 to the quote, an extra “procedural legality”, an additional “OH! You should see what THESE people did with THEIR flower arrangements”. So much so that the process that I’d dreamed of for many years, moved away from being an idyllic fairy-like dream-phase, and turned into a horrible overwhelming struggle to absorb and remember everything that I could and still try add our own personal flavour to all that we did.
Starting a new business has been no different. Being new to the business world, one thinks that all the advice received is critical – with equal weight – that we need to absorb, remember and implement. Ultimately, our dream of starting our own home bakery, or corner art gallery turns into an impersonal, run-of-the-mill business where we sit at the end of the day and question our reason for starting it in the first place.
The best advice that I received as a novice in the business world, was to identify the “Must-Do” stuff from the “Better-than-the-Jones’ ” stuff. I was told to make a list of all the critical things that my new business needed, in order to get started. Basic things like:
What made you start your business in the first place?
Go back to those questions – re-discover the things that drive you. You will soon see that things fall into place and that these “gurus” that are pushing you to sprint, also had to start at the VERY beginning. So take a moment, relax, and start with a To-Do list.
And that still, to this day, continues to work for me.
So as I continue to work with this new start-up client of mine, taking things one step at a time and bringing focus back to the key list of things that need to be done – is how he will overcome the nerves, the competition, and most of all, become the business that he is destined to be.
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