Category: Business Startup Plan

What is stopping you? Fear is the key.

New ventures, overcoming the element of fear and using it to your advantage.

Hello again,

Driving along the other day, I was musing on why I have not gone for certain opportunities that have come my way and why I did for others.

It’s not that the opportunities were not good. Or that I couldn’t work out the risk element and how to mitigate it. I think it was mainly to do with fear of failure and fear of not knowing if I could do it.

Fear of failure is all part of all business enterprises – it takes you to the edge, where simultaneously there is the feeling of fear mixed with the excitement of getting it right. This is the part that entrepreneurs seem to love – the uncertainty of it all. Once you get past this, then the actual day to day stuff is dull. That’s where another opportunity comes along and off you go again.

If you are an employee, there is some degree of this feeling to with new projects etc, but there is usually a safety net, and of course you can always blame the process. If you’re on your own facing it, if it fails, the blame comes right back to you and there is no escape. Not everyone can handle this.

The other way of looking at all this is that to learn anything, you have to make mistakes. Thousands of small businesses close up because they make mistakes that they cannot recover from.  The benefit if having kept a business going for several years is that by that time, you will have worked out what the dangers are and how to avoid a catastrophic mistake.

Getting going early has a terrific benefit of giving you the opportunity to mess things up at an age where you are able to take it. Once you have a good job, mortgage and responsibilities, it is harder to give a new project a go, just in case it doesn’t work. You have too much to lose.

Once you have experience (messed up lots of times) you then have the confidence to go after opportunities and you become better at spotting them, working out how much can be made and how to set up a system to run the new venture.

So, what’s stopping you? Fear? Great, that’s the key.

Have a good weekend. All the best, Roy Lewis

Are you a business mentor?

The benefits to both parties of business mentoring.

Hello again,

This blog is different as it is all about other businesses.

A couple of years ago, I was approached by a local Chamber of Commerce to be a business mentor for a small local business. I was flattered and surprised. But mainly, I was perplexed as to why they had asked me. I did not consider myself as having any special talent for business and couldn’t see how my experiences could translate over to others.

Well, I was wrong on all of those ideas.

Several mentee companies later and I am happy to report that I really look forward to spending time with the companies I now see. It’s not really that I have experienced exactly what they are going through – all businesses have their own unique issues to overcome. I think it is more of a case of at least I have been going long enough to have survived all sorts of disasters and have come through it all with a sense of perspective that the mentees find useful. Or I hope they do anyway.

The other aspect that I find useful is that for an hour at a time, I have the opportunity to help someone out and when I describe how I am handling something similar to their struggle, it often happens that they too have ideas that I can bring to bear on the situations that I am handling.

Some business mentors have a very strict method of going about it. I prefer to chat through things and focus on one main issue at a time and then track it from meeting to meeting, checking progress as we go.

Why not help out another business local to where you live? Too busy? No time? Don’t know who to contact? All these and other excuses are just that. Give it a go and see how you get on. After all, what do you really have to lose?

Have a good weekend. Kind regards, Roy Lewis

Coming soon…20 steps to starting a direct to consumer business

A New Year -the ideal time to start your ‘direct to consumer’ business – what you need to know in 20 blogs.

Well here we are at the end of the year and what have you done? How about getting that business idea you have up and running in 2011? Read on….

I remember years ago when I was an employee, I just couldn’t imagine how on earth anyone could start a business and get going. There was so much that I didn’t know about and when I eventually did have to get on and start a company, because I was no longer needed by my employer, I had to learn by making mistakes, how do do it.

I have been asked for years to write down how to get started in selling something direct to the consumer, so now I have done it. In January, starting from 6th, I will produce a blog each working day until I have it all down. The focus will be on how to start a business selling direct to consumers at events and then how to build a customer base. The same principles apply for an online business too.

Once the Startup blogs are published, I will then have a go at all the new ways to start a business on the Internet. I will report back on how I am progressing, what has worked and what has not and what I did about it. I am especially interested in trying out ideas that all the blurb that goes with it says they are ‘really easy to do’.

So, the objective of the forthcoming blogs is to provide you with some stepping stones, based on years of experience, in all the areas I will discuss. This is not just the same old stuff from textbooks, churned out by yet another wannabe businessman – I have created liqueurs, marketed, sold them and developed a mail order business, on and off line, so it’s all real. I will detail too, all the horrendous mistakes I made on the way, so you can avoid them, save time and money and get to your planned end point quicker and with less hassle.

For the up and coming blogs, you will be able to discover:

  • How to plan your new business
  • Routes to market
  • Building a customer base
  • Setting up a mail order system
  • Events – choosing the right ones for you
  • Setting up your stall – what goes where
  • Talking to customers – which words work best
  • Your year ahead plan and handling doubts
  • Selling or supplying – which is more profitable
  • Persuasive words and closing the sale
  • Things not do do in front of any customer
  • Deciding what to sell and why
  • Confidence boosting measures that work

That’s just some idea of what the blogs will cover and I’ll add more content as they go along too, depending on comments during the process.

So have a good New Year, write down some ideas for 2011 and look out for the first blog of the series starting on January 6th. All the best, Roy Lewis