Each week I will aim to provide you with a gem of advice from my own personal journey as an entrepreneur. Whether I’m qualified to do that is anyone’s guess given I’m so new to the world of entrepreneurialism. So how did I embark on this journey of co founding not one but two businesses in less than a year?
Well I can’t claim to be one of those smart young children making money from selling my pet chicken’s eggs on the side of a country road that had 1 car drive by per hour at 120km/ph. That was just plain optimistic! But I guess I could convince people to do things if I was truly passionate about it. I felt I was meant to have my own business as my career path of short lived jobs attested to the fact that I wasn’t meant for conventional employment.
Over the years I’ve had several excellent ideas for businesses and never executed any. I started writing business plans, I talked passionately about my ideas with friends and family. I bought clever domain names and even did up logo designs. And yet nothing eventuated. Sometimes it was because I talked myself out of the idea before it even got legs. Other times it was because I listened to well meaning friends tell me it wouldn’t work, despite the fact that they had no business experience either. More often it was fear – not fear of failure, but of actually succeeding. And finally, it was the fear, that if I reached that level of success I’d envisioned, what if it didn’t live up to my expectations?
In a nutshell I’ve realized that these are all just excuses. Why?
Because the difference between successful people and those who aren’t is that successful people take action, they just get on and do it, where as the latter talk about it and never execute. Finally I’ve put myself in the first category. I want to create my own lifestyle, accomplish something grand and leave a legacy I’m proud of. So I’ve bought my ticket and am locked in to the rollercoaster ride of starting and growing a business – and I don’t ever want to get off!
So how did I get into my first business. Well it was luck. Luck = preparation meeting opportunity. Firstly in packing up my life in London and moving to Vancouver, the home of entrepreneurs and networking events. Secondly it was becoming a queen of networking and one night at a startup event, whilst following the most impressive looking cheese platter, meeting my future business partner. He introduced himself over the cheese. To this day I’m always surprised how my answer got me anywhere. It went exactly like this:
Daryl: So what do you want to do?
Me: I’m a homeless unemployed bum and I want to start my own business
Daryl: We should talk!
We still laugh about our fortuitous meeting even now. Daryl sold me on his idea for a business. He wanted to solve a pain that all organisers experience in managing members, collecting fees and fundraising. I told him how my background and skills could help. We took a chance and I began conducting market validation, competitor analysis and ensuring there was a big enough problem our solution could address. Those were the heady days where anything was possible and we could do it all. It’s amazing how quickly that goes. But in its place you get a sense that you’re working on something potentially great – just with larger dose of reality thrown in. From there it grew organically and before you know it, we had an incorporated business – ConnectionPoint Systems Inc and a product to develop – FundRazr.
The two of us went from having random café meetings all over town to squatting in a Gastown office of another small company. It was here we gained our part time CFO Bill and poached our two developers, Christian and Daniel. Within a month we literally rolled chairs, printers and computers up the street to a new shared office with beautiful harbour views. Along came Andrew our talented 3 for the price of 1 designer and there we were, a full time team of 5. It suddenly felt very real. That’s when we got our second dose of reality.
A team means operating costs and that means eating through money. Daryl has invested in us himself and did a stellar job of getting our first investor that essentially kick started us. Between the two of us we managed to bring in some more money from `friends, family and fools’ whilst our product was being developed. In late May Daryl made me a Co Founder after acknowledging we were both living and breathing the business and doing everything together.
As an entrepreneur you wear many hats and become adept at looking good in all of them – marketing, sales, business planning, investment pitching, revenue modelling, pricing, PR, customer relations, office management, leadership, operations, finance…. need I go on. But it’s one helluva ride and if I look back to when I first started out I couldn’t tell you how much I’ve learned and will continue to learn on a daily basis.
My advice is be prepared to have many highs interspersed with many lows, days when you feel you can conquer the world and days when you’d prefer to not see anyone. The trick is the POWER OF FOCUS and never giving in. The next series of blogs I write will each have a special focus to help you with your own business journey. Stay tuned for success!