Just Do It (But Have A Plan)

My daughter, who is fifteen going on thirty, loves to write.  She’s actually pretty good at it, and has been talking about publishing a book since she was about seven.  Who knows if it will ever really happen, but dreams are good things to have, even in this day and age.  Anyway, my advice to her has always been that there’s no guarantee that you’ll be successful, no matter what you do:  write, produce widgets, create software, whatever.  There is, however, a 100% guarantee of failure if you never even try.  I have always tried to impress upon her that the most important difference (although certainly not the only difference) between a published author and someone who never gets anything published is that the published person actually finishes the book and sends it out.    

Just do it!  If you’re like me and old enough to remember the old Nike marketing pitch of maybe twenty-five years ago (man, I am old!), when their swoosh was a fairly new image on the American business landscape, you’ll recall that they were using these words to get people off their butts to start exercising.  (Well, to get off their butts, anyway, and go buy Nike shoes.)  But the principle still made sense:  just do it! It was a great pitch then for athletic equipment, and it’s still a great pitch today for small business owners.  If you want to get it done, you have to get it done.  I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, when I tell them what I do (publish money management workbooks for kids) how they “have such a great story idea for a book;  I just can’t find the time to write it all down, but I know it would be great…”.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.   Just do it!

So what does all of this have to do with owning a business?  If you’re thinking of starting a business, and you have an idea that you think might work, don’t blow yourself off by the fear that it takes a million dollars and triple mortgages on your house to make it happen.  But it does take two things:  your persistence, and a plan.  In other words, just do it (but start with a plan).  One without the other really doesn’t work.  So here are a few tips to get you started on taking your idea to the next step.

1. Talk to someone your trust about your idea.  Make sure it’s someone who will give you honest feedback (“Great idea:  I think it can really work!”; or, “Are you nuts?”)
2. Do your research.  Very important, this.  When I started my company, I was looking for something to teach my kids about money, like a ledger book.  Before I spent so much as a dime on a sheet of copy paper, I looked in every bookstore and on every website I could find to see if such a workbook existed.  If you have something that has little competition, so much the better.  If your product is one of many that are already on the market, think about what’s going to set you apart. (Remember: there’s really only one thing you need to succeed in business:  customers.)
3. Decide if you have what it takes to do even this initial work:  Are you willing to invest your time and energy into researching and finding out about the product/industry that you’ve chosen?  Are you willing to hear about obstacles that may be in your way that you haven’t even considered yet?  Oh, and don’t quit your day job just yet.
4. Get advice from someone who knows.  College business professors are always the first ones that fledgling businesspeople think of to talk to.  And I’ve never understood why this is, since for the most part, they’ve spent their careers standing in front of classrooms full of inexperienced students talking about business theory, and have usually never run a business or sold anything in their lives.  I learned this the hard way, when I was referred to a professor of internet marketing (a friend of my brother’s) for advice on my website.  He was extremely gracious, and quite forthcoming with advice, but in the end said to me, “Please take what I’ve told you with a grain of salt:  I’ve never actually ever sold or marketed anything online.”   Huh??!!  Anyway, find someone locally who is in a non-competing business, and buy him or her lunch in exchange for advice. Businesspeople love being asked for their opinion, and they love helping folks who are new at it.      
5. Get a legal pad and a pen, and start making a plan. Not a business plan (not yet), but a plan of what you see happening during your first year of this “experiment”.  Brainstorm alone, and write it all down.  Now take the pages you’ve written and file them away.  You’ll look at them on one year’s time to see what you’ve accomplished.
6. Read (if you haven’t already) the article on this website about “Mr. Big Idea Meets Mr.Banker”.

Now, just do it!  Whatever it is you’ve set out for yourself, take it step by step.  Don’t hyper yourself into a frenzy by looking at your whole big picture:  it will be too scary.  If you take it one thing at a time, and build on your successes, it will start to fit together, and before you know it, you will have the beginnings of something.  It takes energy, persistence and patience.  Soon enough, you’ll have someone say to you, “Wow!  I can’t believe you did this all yourself!”