Why you don’t need a plan to start
Many people are not too happy at work. They feel that they were meant to do bigger things than what they are doing right now. They complain about the nature of their job, about their colleagues, and most likely about their boss. This lack of internal satisfaction drives many people to be in a constant hunt for their next job. And when they find their new job, and settle down, they notice that even this job has its own problems, and therefore start the search again for the next job. Which is good, it’s much better than settling down to a mundane life. A life with no passion.
That said, people rarely search for their dream job. They merely look for a next job. There might be a number of reasons for this, including the lack of belief they are worthy of living their dreams.
''I believe that everyone deserves to live their dream life, because I think that if your mind can perceive the type of dream life that you want to live, then it’s only a matter of time, and effort till you achieve it''
With this belief I am driven to help people succeed in creating (not finding) their dream job. I want to help people start their own business, and here and now I am going to share all the ‘plans’ you’ll ever need to start a business.
''When starting a business, you don’t need a solid plan, you just need persistence''.
Many people spend years thinking, and crafting their ‘perfect’ plan, inside their own head, without every putting that plan to the test. Starting a business is not a small task, so for now let’s compare it to want to design and build a new ship, and you’ve never studied the science behind building ships, nor have you got any experience on the subject. If you’re that ambitions (which is the kind of ambition you’re going to need to start a business) you can do any of the following:
Give up – acknowledge that you are not capable of doing it, and no matter how much you want to ‘build this ship’ you decide to scrap your plans before you even start. Say that other people are lucky, or lie to yourself that you never wanted the ship in the first place, and leave it at that. This sad reality is what most people resort to.
Plan to imperfection – in this case, your determination tells you that you should go ahead and start learning on how to build ships. You either start reading books, or decide to take official courses. Naturally, the knowledge that you’ll gain from these methods is generic, and will not teach you how to build the specific ship that you want. So you’d need to modify what you’ve learnt to make plans that fit your needs. This approach would take a lot of time and money, and would leave you with only a plan that, so far, only ‘works’ on paper. You’d still need to build it, and then hope that your ship floats while in the port. This has 2 further problems, first, you’d need a lot of money (you’re going to build the full scale ship that you have in your head), and secondly, even if the ship floats in the port, that doesn’t mean that it would float in gale winds when out at the open seas. So no matter the amount of planning you’re going to do, your ‘perfect’ plan is going to be still weak, and you’re still going to have your insecurities – which would be completely justifiable.
Try. Fail. Repeat. – the other method that you can employ is to just start building a ship. At the beginning you’d start with a very small ship. You’d find which materials work best for the type of ship you want to build, from where to buy that material, how much it costs. At this point, even though you are not building the exact ship that you’d want to have, you are gathering practical knowledge on ship-building, and making the right connections with people who will eventually be critical when you are ready to build your own ship. By creating bigger and bigger ships (and failing countless times in the process), eventually, you’d have the required skills and connections to build the ship of your dreams. Think of Wright brothers – the guys who created the first planes – do you think that they just created 1 model for a plane, took it to a runway and just flew to Paris? Probably not. Probably they crashed a thousand times before the plan actually lifted for 1cm off the ground.
I know that your business probably doesn’t involve ships, nor planes, but I feel that the analogy is perfectly relevant. When building your own business, you’re going to be creating something big, and that might intimidate you. So at first, you’re going to want to chunk it down into something is more manageable. You’re going to want to do something that you feel comfortable with, and that even though you might now know exactly how to do, you can summon the right amount of belief in yourself to give it is a shot. This belief will guide you when everything else seems to be telling you to stop. This believe will result in an unwavering courage that doesn’t care about temporary defeats, but only sees such mishaps as learning lessons.
This idea is in-line with my philosophy that you don’t need a lot of money to start a business. The idea of having investors when starting up is the complete opposite of how I think a business should start. If you want to open up a restaurant, start baking food at home, and sell it to friends and family to see that they like it. Then start getting clients, and then with the money you are making from the baking at home, you’d have enough money to pay for the restaurant you want, and you’d already have customers who would be willing to eat at your restaurant because they know the quality of food that you serve. If you don’t manage to get clients to buy your food when baking it home, you should take the hint about your cooking skills. Also, if you’re new at starting a business, the worst thing that you could do, is having people chasing you for money – that would stop you from taking risks.
As a conclusion, therefore I’d like to tell you that the only thing that is stopping you from starting your own business is yourself. You can take the idea of the industry you want to start a business in, chunk it down to a manageable size, and just start working on it. You don’t need to quit your current job to do this. If you really want to make it happen, you’ll do this in your free time. It would be something that you just can’t stop thinking about. Then, as you are implementing the first part of your idea, you will learn more about what you are doing, and realise the flows in your initial idea and continue refining as you go along. No matter how much you plan, you’re never going to know whether it works until you try it out. So start small, get feedback, and then gradually grow your business activity until you reach the level that you had in mind.
If you feel that this resonates with you, in some (strange) way, get in touch, I’d be glad to discuss. I’m not interested in your money, thankfully I’ve made enough money of my own to be beyond that. I just want to give back – I want to help people succeed. Then again it’s up to you whether you are just one of those people who want to complain and not do anything.
