Starting your own business

[Jaron]

I haven't, but the company I work for started as a small startup and has flourished into a successful corporation. The CEO gave a talk on starting your own business recently.

Some of the points he went over:

1) A lot of people start a business because they love doing x and want to make money doing it. What he realized early on is as the CEO/business owner he spent most of his time managing and having other people doing the thing he started the business to do in the first place. So it helps to have a love of managing money and making business decisions rather than just an appreciation for whatever goods or services you are peddling.

2) Early on its really difficult to differentiate and make a case for yourself vs more established businesses in your sector. Its tempting to say you'll just offer lower prices but this is almost always a recipe for a failed business. The company I work for was successful early on because it offered more personalized relationships until they were able to land their first "big fish". Once they had those, they cut could the rope on their original clients. So you should try to find a way to make your business an advantage for people/businesses to use without compromising your price point.

3) Always spend/invest someone else's money (including the business'). There is a businessman here in Utah who had a string of successful and unsuccessful ventures and his advantage has been that when he fails, its not him who is losing money.

4) Know the demand for what you are trying to supply and see if you can study other attempted startups. See if there are reasons they failed so you can prepare for those situations.

I am not sure what you are thinking or on what scale, but the other thing - maybe most important thing - is most successful business owners become successful because they sacrificed their personal life/family life for the sake of capitalism. That sounds right up your alley though.

[Eddie Teach]

If you're opening a McDonald's in Switzerland, you might make Tyr happy.

[Jaron]

Royale with Cheese

[celedhring]

My business plan is doing exactly what I am doing but with better taxation and a liability shield. Spain tax loopholes are stupid.

[Brazen]

Got an accountant recommended by friends already in the biz to set up company and sort all the complicated bits including tax returns and pension then just give me a tax-optimised salary and bonus.

[Jacob]

Who here has done it? Any insights & tips?

Yup.

Working with close associates you trust can be very helpful. It can also reveal that - for some of them - that trust is utterly misplaced.

Main things:

Have a plan for where you are going and how you get there, but be ready to pivot - but if you do, still have a destination in mind.

Ideally, spend other people's money, not your own. If you can't spend other people's money, perhaps your plan is not very good?

The single most important skill to have in board is to find and manage people who can do important stuff you cannot do yourself - and even things you can do well, because you may be too busy managing to do other things.

Don't get tied down with a long term lease for office space if you can avoid it at all - especially not if the commitment is a multiple of the runway you have.

Enjoy it while it lasts - and make sure that there's something for you (i.e. networking or resume building) even if it fails.

[grumbler]

Most of Jacob's advice is quite good, based on my experience doing this twice.  It would be great to get other peoples' money to spend, but you won't find this easy (and maybe not possible) if you don't have a track record and don't have an obviously superior product or service (and if you did, somebody would already be doing it, most likely).  Enlisting partners is probably the way to go.

have a plan for how your company is going to survive if all of your projections for sales and growth are overly optimistic.  If your company depends on cash flow, as most do, have a plan on how to deal with the situation if thee cash flow is half of what you predict.  This plan should include pulling the plug (don't ride a crashing business all the way down to the ground).  Have a plan to cut your losses.

[CountDeMoney]

And have a plan on what to do when your industry, for whatever reason, just disappears.

When I had my own bail bonds company on the Eastern Shore, the Delaware legislature on the last day of the Assembly passed legislation that directly affected alien (out-of-state) insurance companies.  Didn't see it coming, nobody saw it coming;  I didn't, neither did my insurance company.  Next thing you know, I couldn't write in Delaware--which happened to be 75% of my business.

For a cash-and-carry endeavor in which you had to eat what you killed, it was a mortal wound.  Adios, self-employment.

[Martinus]

If possible, find out which media writes about your industry and try sleeping with some of their journalists.

[Josquius]

Go on dragons den.