Startup as a small business entrepreneur - hints and tips

Being a startup, starting a small business or indeed, becoming a small business entrepreneur demands a different mindset to the one that you might be used to if you have a job. Quite simply, with a job, at the end of the week or month, someone will give you a paycheck. Regularly, without fail. Whilst you do have to perform your duties well enough to avoid being sacked, basically, within reason, whatever happens, you’ll still get paid.

Starting a small business or becoming a small business entrepreneur is different. As a startup, you might not get anything at all! How much money you “take home” depends on a lot of different things. In this page, I’m going to try to walk you through some of the necessary things to consider as you make the transition from employee to small business entrepreneur and at last, be your own boss.

There are several key things to consider as a startup.

Timing

Finances

As a small business entrepreneur, we’re often really excited by our ideas, and the dream of “be your own boss”, but don’t stop to look carefully at how they need to be supported. I’ve come across entrepreneurs that I’ve worked with who, for example, are keen to buy equipment, rent premises etc. but really struggle to feel able to commit to properly marketing the opportunity.

There’s no point in having all the gear, and being set-up to provide a product or service, however good it is, if no-one knows you’re there.

In the UK (where I’m from), the London Training and Enterprise Council reckon that a whopping great 70% of startups are underfunded, and that this lack of cash is the major reason why so many fail in the first year of trading... I’m not trying to put you off, but the fact is that around 40% of people starting a new business do fail in the first year. I hope I can help you to be amongst the 60% of successful ones and be your own boss!

There are several ways of raising finance if you are a entrepreneur. These include angel investing, venture capital and also small business grants.

Planning

Cash flow

Fiddling about with spreadsheets and cash flow is often boring to a small business entrepreneur, but, trust me, if you want to be your own boss, it will be one of the key factors in your success, along with...

Marketing

Focus on what you already know

My rockschool franchise business does really well because of that. Franchisees, (each of which is an individual small business entrepreneur) are often musicians (so they have an understanding and affinity to the business model already), and they startup in their own local community (so they already have plenty of knowledge of where they can market and promote the service).

The nitty-gritty of starting a small business

Can you keep your job for a while?

It might mean less leisure time, less watching TV or whatever, but it need not, in the early days, mean less money, because you’ll still have your job to support you. I’ve met a lot of startup entrepreneurs who have started out this way, and gone on to become very successful.

In my own sphere, I’ve helped lots of franchisees in my Clive’s Easylearn Rock and Pop Music Schools through exactly this process. They startup part time running a music school on the weekend and then, gradually, bit-by-bit, the money starts coming in, and then one day (often in the not too distant future), they find themselves able to to hand in their notice in their job, secure that they still have money coming in.

So, my advice to you now, as you seek to be your own boss, is to think about ways that you can combine your startup small business entrepreneur activities with your job. Give it some thought, jot down a few ideas.

What can I do to become
a small business entrepreneur?

But just for now, I’m sorta assuming that you’ve already got a “great idea”. It may be a new product, an invention, a new way of doing something, whatever... but overall, my advice to you is that it must be something DIFFERENT in some recognizable and obvious ways to what's already available out there.

And that difference must be something that your potential customers can clearly recognize (without having to look too hard!)

For example, my startup changed the face of music lessons. Instead of them being dreary things that took place in a back bedroom with an ancient, boring teacher, I took them into community centers, had guitarists, bassists, drummers and keyboardists all learning together with headphones on, taught by young, motivated local musicians that we’d trained to deliver our courses.

At the end of each session, the headphones came off, everyone plugged in, and rocked out in a big jam session. Result? Great fun for everyone, tons of repeat business and a network of loads of similar outlets with a combined annual turnover of millions of dollars.

And very soon, I realized that the secret of growth was not to do try to do everything myself, but to delegate some of the tasks to others, and that brought me to staffing, which is a key element to consider when you plan your own business. Staffing a business properly enables you to focus on the most important task - growth.

Unique selling points - or "USP's"

At an early stage of your startup development as a small business entrepreneur with an idea, you need to try to come up with a few USP’s for your own invention. And it’s a good idea to do it sooner rather than later, because these points are probably, more than anything else, the things that will make you a success as you embark upon starting a new business and start moving along the route to be your own boss.

They will be the things that stick in customers minds about your startup product or service, and the things that you can push to the forefront of your advertising.

It’s simple and straightforward really, but so many people who are starting a small business, don’t even think of this sort of stuff. Instead, they charge on with their “idea”, giving no real though to how it will be perceived (or indeed wanted) by the end-user... their important startup customers.

It’s tempting, if you’re hoping to sell to a supplier (like a shop or distributor), to not worry too much about usp’s, figuring that “well, it’s not really my problem - I’m not selling to the customer.” WRONG. In the end, whether you sell direct, or through a middleman, it’s going to be all about sales.

I thought I heard you groan then? Yep, I know, as a creative person with an exciting startup idea, and the desire to be your own boss, the thought of having to worry about sales and marketing and all that stuff, may seem depressing at first. Especially if what you’d rather be doing is inventing, creating - doing the exciting things that you always thought a small business entrepreneur did. But trust me, if you don’t integrate and consider sales and usp’s, you might not make any money. And that, after all, combined with a much better lifestyle, is the whole point of being an entrepreneur, and starting a small business, isn’t it?

The only people who can immerse themselves in the creative world and block out the outside, are those who work in the development departments of big organizations, which have other departments to look after sales and marketing and everything else. And that’s a million miles away from the typical startup “be your own boss” scenario.

As a small business entrepreneur, maybe you work for a big company like that, but don’t want them profiting from your great idea? That’s a good basis to become a beginner entrepreneur in itself!

So, as you being thinking about starting a small business based on your idea, also think about your customer - or the end-user. And as you develop your startup idea, see if you can build in some usp’s as you go.

To check whether you’ve managed to do so successfully, pretend that you’re in a lift with someone who you want to sell your startup idea to. It’s a once in a lifetime chance to explain your invention.

You’re on the ground floor.

He says, whilst pressing the button for floor 15, “well, tell me about this thing you’re doing. What is it exactly?”

You have got 30 seconds to explain it and generate some interest.

Could you do it? How could you explain your complicated invention?

There’s only one way... stress it’s USP’s - and you’re done. Success!

Business name

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Where do I go for advice?

My advice will always be friendly and honest. And the answer to the “where do I start” question is also simple and straightforward - try to develop your startup “be your own boss” idea from something that you know about or love. Why? It’s easier, that’s why!

And it’s easier for a whole lot of reasons. First of all, you know what you’re talking about, you know your subject. Ideally, you’ve lived and breathed it. I couldn’t write this website for you unless I’d been a successful small business entrepreneur and had lots of experience in starting a small business (that has since grown huge). It wouldn't be as in depth or genuine. It wouldn’t ring true. You wouldn’t trust it probably, either.

I bet you know a lot about something. If you’ve been in a job for a while, you’ll have gain a lot of experience seeing how things are done in your industry. It might be computers, it might be metalwork, it might be all manner of things. And I’ll bet that sometimes you’ve thought to yourself “what a daft way of doing that. Why don’t they do it like this, for goodness sake?”

Finding a better way of doing something is often the trigger to startup the entrepreneurial spark and the desire to be your own boss. Have you been at work in your job and come across this sort of thing? Think back? It could be the start of something.

Equally, you might be a graduate student. You’ve followed a university course and, along the way, you’ve solved a problem in a unique way. A problem that no-one else seemed to be able to solve. You created a process. Processes can often be the startup for entrepreneurial ideas too.

But this search for startup small business entrepreneur ideas doesn’t have to start and finish with the world of education and work. Most people enjoy hobbies at home. And many, many times, hobbies, for thousands of people, have gradually formed themselves into entrepreneurial ideas and successful startup businesses.

Take me for example. Way back when I was a teenager, my hobby was playing rock music, being in bands, gigging. Once in a while I thought (as everyone does) that I might become “a star”; that maybe I could “make it”. Funny thing is, in the end, I did make it, not as a rock-star, but rather as a rock music entrepreneur. It’s a classic example of turning your hobby into a business - profiting for your passions. I always wanted to be my own boss.

Being a startup small business entrepreneur is so exciting, because there’s so much that you could do. Everyone with the right entrepreneurial mindset could do something. Different people will enjoy different levels of success, based on their motivation and, to an extent (but not too much of an extent) having some ‘good luck”. I am sure that, because you’re here reading this, that you could be a successful startup small business entrepreneur. You’ve already taken some important first steps, searched me out, and the world absolutely needs entrepreneurs like you.

Think about it. If we didn’t have startup entrepreneurs, then we wouldn’t have people starting a new business or inventing new products. Life would be dull. There would be no Microsoft or Apple or Virgin... all these huge corporations (and thousands more just like them) got their startup as just an idea in someone’s mind. Someone just like you.

It’s true.

I live in England, and when I was a teenager, I remember seeing Richard Branson’s first little black and white adverts for his startup mail order record business, run from a dingy basement somewhere near London. They appeared in the classified sections of music magazines like New Musical Express (NME), Melody Maker and Sounds. Virgin got into starting a small business with a USP - cheap mail order records. Now look at it!

Bill Gates and Microsoft are another similar startup example - geeks in a garage, same with Apple. You see what I’m getting at.

If they can do it, so can you. Startup tiny with your own precious good idea. Add some USP’s, give it plenty of time (ideally in between keeping your full-time job), and watch it grow.

Write it down!

Anyway, I digress... on its own, a good idea is not enough, I just wrote. Well, what exactly do I mean by that?

Okay. There are going to be a lot of other factors to consider. But the first one is that, if you don’t document it, then you don’t own it.

Elsewhere in entrepreneurbeginner.com I discuss copyright and patents, but before we get anywhere near that stuff, what I want you to start thinking about is “processes”.

Many small business entrepreneur ideas revolve around processes. Ways of doing things that are different (like we’ve been chatting about above). It may be, as in my case, a different way of teaching music. That process can be worth millions (in my case it literally has been). But how can you “own” a process - a way of doing things?

The short answer... write it down.

The word of franchising (and I’ve got a separate page for you on that), revolves around processes. Processes that have been documented and then shown to others, who carry them out exactly, time and again.

For example, who would have thought that you could be starting a small business that’s grown huge, from a simple startup and make TONS of money out of cutting and caring for lawns? Sure there are plenty of gardeners out there, and they do alright, but they just have a few local customers and that’s it...

However, in the franchise world, there are some very successful lawn-care companies. They operate right across the States - and beyond. It’s a HUGE business. But what exactly is it?

Simple answer... it’s a process.

A process that has been written down.

Every lawn-care operator markets the business the same way, mows the lawn the same way, sprinkles the fertilizer on the same way, talks to the customer the same way, bills in the same way.

The process is the business. The business is the process!

The customer buys a process. And it’s only a process if it’s written down.

One day, someone, somewhere, started to write down the process for cutting and caring for a lawn. In ridiculous detail. Now they OWN that process (even though anyone with a mower can cut a lawn). And from a simple startup idea, there’s a multi-million Dollar business as a result.

More of this - much more - in the section on franchising that I’ve written for you. Franchising has helped thousands of people with that dream to be your own boss.

But for now, just think about your startup idea. If it’s a service-based business or a way of doing things, one of the first things you need to do as a beginner small business entrepreneur is WRITE IT DOWN.

Then you’ve immediately gone a long way towards owning it. It exists as something. It’s not just in your head any more. You’re on the way to becoming a small business entrepreneur and starting a small business, and above all, you’re on the right route to be your own boss!