12 Basic Steps to Starting Your Own Business

You are in a job you hate and want to get out. But how? Starting your own business is your ticket to freedom. Ultimate goal - make your side hustle replace your salary so you can quit your job. Don’t quit yet though, you’ve got some work to do first. Here are some no cost basics to get you going:

1) Are you in enough pain to change your stars?

We only change when we are feeling enough pain. Up to that point, we put up with miserable lives for years. So answer this first - are you in enough pain about your current situation? Because if you are not, you simply won’t put in the work it takes to manage a business.

2) Will you commit to daily dedicated time to your business?

Amazingly, just talking about something doesn’t actually make it happen. You physically have to get up and do something. Running a business is no joke. It’s years of incredibly hard work that has to start somewhere. If you are married with young children, working full time already, you are going to be sorely pressed for time. If like me, you live on a food producing farm, managing farm staff, running a company, managing office staff, married, pets, mothers; you are also going to be super short on time.

You need minimum of an hour a day for a couple of years at least to get anywhere on your side hustle. And that’s going to be slow progress.

That being said, we spend too much time watching TV and doomscrolling - will you give up that to spend it building your business? I read a cool thing once that said 90-90-1. Spend 90 minutes a day, for 90 days on just one thing.

Will you commit to that?

3) Get your LinkedIn profile up to date

LinkedIn is the de facto business platform. All recruiters now look in LinkedIn to find candidates. Even as an employee, your LinkedIn profile should be immaculate and up to date. As a future business owner, it has to be better than immaculate. It has to be a brand in itself.

Get a decent photo, put in a proper career history, intro paragraph. Mark your profile as available for work. Showcase your skills in what you want to sell.

4) Decide which social media platforms you are going to use

You do not have to be on every platform. Choose just one other apart from LinkedIn and start there. Whatever you choose, you need to be consistent. This generally means posting daily. You will need to learn the rules of the game though, each platform has different nuances.

5) Start building a brand

As a new business owner, you won’t have any social proof that you can do what you say you can do. Until you build up a client base that can give you referrals, you can write posts and articles showcasing your knowledge, insights, skills and opinions. Start a newsletter like mine. This is crucial to stand out from the crowd.

Whatever you post on social media from this moment on must support your brand and bring you closer to your business goals. No more sharing of cat videos and nonsense. Your online presence is your CV for future clients and business partners. Act accordingly.

Get eyes on your content asap. Post your articles to forums with more than 200 people in them to slingshot you into the light. You need eyes on your story to win the hearts of the people.

4) Decide what your products are going to be and who will buy them

Will you sell physical products, or digital ones, or consulting services? The approach will be different depending which way you’re going. Or maybe a blend of all of them.

You need to sell something that people are going to want. There has to be some sort of decision process to decide your offerings. Have you identified a gap in the market? Is there any competition for what you want to sell? Yes? Good! It means there is a market for it. Just selling random things to random people is not going to work. A lot of people do this because they are desperate for money.

Focus your attention on just one thing to start with. You can add products later. It takes years to establish your brand and build a client base.

5) Learn to sell

Every business relies on sales. No sales, no business. But few people know how to sell. This, however, is a skill that can be learned. Go to YouTube and search “how to sell”. There are some basics you can start with like:

• Never lie to a client.

• Protect your reputation at all costs.

• Don’t be phony and pretend to be someone you’re not. It’s unnecessary and people will pick up on the fakeness. Be the real you.

• Over deliver and under promise.

• If you screw up, fess up, then fix up to move up.

• When you get your first client, go an 50 extra miles to deliver on what you promised.

• Follow up and stay in touch. They might not need your stuff now, but they might later.

6) How to decide what you’re going to charge

This will be different for product-based businesses, versus service-based businesses. With products, you need to factor in all manufacturing and delivery costs. With services, you need to factor in the time it will take for you to deliver on what you’re selling.

Don’t worry about what other people are charging. Ask yourself how much extra you need a month.

Let’s stay it’s R3000 a month you need so that you can build up enough savings to get to the next level in your game. That would be:

• 15 clients at R200 a month / 15 products at R200 each after expenses, or

• 6 clients at R500 a month / 6 products at R500 each after expenses, or

• 3 clients at R1000 a month / 3 products at R1000 each after expenses.

When you break it down like that, it’s not so overwhelming. Start small.

7) Learn to manage money

Another thing we are not taught in schools. Managing your own money in your own business is a whole other animal compared to managing your salary from your day job and managing your corporate budget.

Cashflow is everything.

Endless startups fail because of lack of cashflow.

A great tip I got once was - get a 50% deposit. That must cover all your costs to deliver on what you’ve sold. That way, if they don’t pay the rest, at least your expenses are covered. The balance 50% is pure profit. That methodology got me out of plenty hot water in the first 5 years of Lets Collaborate.

DO NOT run out and buy offices, office equipment, a new car, Gucci handbags, random stuff. Work from your bed with what you have got right now. Make the money first, spend it later. DO NOT spend money you have not made yet.

And when you do start to make money, immediately invest it back into your business - feed the thing that feeds you.

My #1 rule - it’s not a sale until the money is in the bank!

8) Get testimonials from your first sale

This is how you start to build out your portfolio of evidence. Remember you need to prove what you can do. Why should I spend my money with you as a start up? Because you say so? No. Prove it. So this means you may need to start building proof whilst you are working fulltime.

If you haven’t made a sale yet, list all the things you did in corporate life that show you have the base skills to do the job on your LinkedIn profile. If you’re starting a financial consultancy, you could demonstrate how you managed a X million budget at X number of firms / departments before going solo.

Get colleagues and suppliers to write you recommendations on LinkedIn until you can get other reviews from clients in your side hustle.

9) Get systems in place so you can scale

Every small business falls into the same trap. Those chaotic first years are mostly just chasing your tail trying to get everything done at once. But trust me, if you design a system to keep track of what you are doing right from the beginning, you will be smiling for a long time into the future. Whether you are going to stay a solopreneur, or be a small business, or become the next Accenture, you need systems to thrive and scale.

Research, development, manufacturing, product fulfilment, invoicing, sales, marketing, compliance, HR, IT, you name it. A business needs these things to survive. Document how stuff needs to work from day one. It means that when you get to the point that you can pay for actual platforms to manage your business, you already have the specs to provide to developers. If you need to hire someone in a rush, you’ll have specs that they can follow to get going quickly.

10) Decide if you actually like people

People do business with people that they like. We can pick up with someone is being less than genuine. So if your attitude is that you don’t even like people, have nothing to actually say to them, and that they generally just irritate you; then are you really a good fit as a business owner? You don’t like people but you expect those same people to give you their hard-earned money? It doesn’t work like that.

Being friendly, nice and genuinely interested in people is what sets you apart from the rest.

11) Make it easy for people to do business with you

People can’t buy from you if they can’t find you. People get irritated when you don’t put prices on your physical products and say things like “DM me for more info”. People get put off when they have to fill in a 50-question piece of paper to order something from you. Stop making labels for things with no contact details on them. Stop making people jump all over the show for the something as basic as ordering something from you. You aren’t Amazon.com, keep it simple.

12) Remember who you are - allow your success

The world is heavily biased towards the masculine energy of doing. But the feminine energy of allowing is just as important. These two energies need to be in balance to give you the best shot at success. You are an eternal, sentient being who came here to create your world.

Allow your success to come to you. Believe you are worthy of success. Let it in. Say it out loud: I deserve success. I am worthy of success. I deserve to have money. I deserve a better future for myself.

Stuff like that.