How Not To Start Your Business

Sooner or later you’re going to have to share your idea with other people. You might be looking for a business partner, an investor, a supplier or even customers and you’re going to have to tell them all about your business if you want to succeed. In fact the more people you can tell and the quicker you can spread the word about your business the quicker it’ll get funded, get noticed and win customers, assuming of course that it’s a good idea.

Yes ok, I’m sure you think your business idea is the best thing since sliced bread and worth millions too. Get real! You’re probably not a genius and your business idea is probably not all that great. If it is brilliant, then the chances are someone else has thought of it too. Trust me, even if you really are “one in a million” there are still over at least 6,650 other people on earth that are as smart as you.

Even if your idea is great, every man and his dog are not going to rush to steal your idea. Like you, they’ve got their own ideas which no doubt they think are just as great, if not better. So why would they want your idea and not theirs?

Besides if your idea is so simple that they can easily steal it, it’s almost certainly not a good idea.

The reality is, it’s impossible to protect a business idea. Yes I’m aware of the concept of Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), but if you’re looking for investors you’ll soon find out that few (if any) serious investors will sign them. Besides even if they do sign an NDA and then steal your idea, can you really afford to pursue them legally?

On the other hand, while you cannot get legal protection for your idea, you can get legal protection for your implementation of the idea through the use of copyright, design rights, trademarks and patents. So if you still want to protect your idea, focus on the execution and make sure you protect that.

For those sceptics, have a think about Google, the idea behind it is simple and the idea was widely shared including being published in a couple of academic papers The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web and The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine written by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. They went on to turn the idea into a company worth billions of dollars by focusing on the execution of their idea. Meanwhile, despite the idea being public no one has managed to copy Google. That’s because their implementation is well protected, they have a good brand (protected by trademarks), they’ve got patents on all their core technology and the details of the specific implementation of the search engine are kept secret.

So don’t keep the idea secret, shout it out to the world and protect the execution of the idea.

I know, it’s odd advice for me to give you considering this blog is ultimately about starting a business, but don’t start a business. You probably don’t really want to start a business anyway. Go on ask yourself, why am I reading this? Do I really want to start a business?

Did you ask yourself that? Were you honest? Come on tell the truth now. If you’re really honest with yourself you’ve just admitted you don’t want to start a business. So what do you want to do? Why are you even reading this if not to start a business?

Well that I don’t know, but I’d hazard a guess that it’s one or more of the following reasons:

• You’re sick of working for that idiot/prat/sleezebag of a boss of yours.
• You’ve been made redundant.
• You’ve been fired by the aforementioned boss (apparently around 20% of entrepreneurs have so you’re in good company).
• You hate your job.
• You want a better work life balance.
• You want to change the world.

In short you want to be your own boss and take control of your own future and maybe even change the world. Great, congratulations on making that choice, believe me it’s much more fun, more rewarding and I for one would never voluntarily return to the rat race.

Wanting to be your own boss is very different from wanting to start a business. So if being your own boss is your goal don’t start a business, become an entrepreneur.

So what’s the difference?

Well if you start a business you’re tied to it, you’ll invest in it both financially and emotionally and if it turns out to be the wrong business, which it almost certainly will you’ll be reluctant to bin it and start another.

An entrepreneur however will continually be looking for opportunities, assessing risks and looking for ways to maximise the opportunities that they come across. As an entrepreneur you’re emotionally invested in your success, or the success of your vision, not that of a business, which might not be the right business for you.

Gary Frank was quick to recognise that he started the wrong business when he founded the Delicious Donut Company in 1997. By the end of the first year he realised no one wanted his donuts, so he soon stopped selling them and moved into muffins and flapjacks. The muffins really took off and the business grew. These days the Delicious Donut Company is known as The Fabulous Bakin’ Boys and sells it’s products through all the major supermarkets.

Every entrepreneur dreams of coming up with a innovative new business idea. It’s exciting, we’re going to change the world, making it better, faster cheaper, greener and we’re going to get rich doing it! Unfortunately the reality is that new business ideas suck.

It’s harder to get people to invest in new business ideas, because investors know that they are more likely to fail. It’s true too, you’re more likely to fail in business by pursuing a new business idea than by creating a business around a proven idea. Sure you can build on a business idea, do it better, faster, cheaper but brand spanking new ideas are risky.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that you can’t make it big without a new business idea. Consider Google for example, they weren’t the first search engine, not even the second, in fact they were roughly the fifteenth search engine and many of the others have been around for several years and already had good, established brands. Now Google is worth billions and only Internet old-timers can name the original search engines.

Yes some new ideas work, but it’s usually the second, third or fourth business that copies the idea that does best from it. The first business to pursue a new idea tends to rack up the biggest expenses in research and development and marketing, burning through it’s budgets. The followers can then enter the market on smaller budgets, with less risk.

In short, don’t hunt for a brand new business idea, if you want to do something new, be the second, third or fourth business into a new market.

Far too many would be entrepreneurs spend their lives wishing they could start their own business, but never do. Why? Because the are continually looking for The Big Idea.

What sets the successful entrepreneurs apart from the failures or even worse the never-even-started is not an amazing new business idea, it’s the execution.

Look at Richard Branson, he’s a billionaire, he’s widely acknowledged to be one of the most successful entrepreneurs around and what businesses got him there? A chain of record shops, a record label and an air line. None of these were big ideas.

Duncan Bannatyne is a multi-millionaire and one of the investors on Dragons’ Den and he most certainly did not start with a big idea, instead he started his entrepreneurial endeavours selling ice cream from a second hand ice cream van. He went on to build nursing homes, nurseries and gyms, none of which I’d call a big idea.

Welcome to How Not To Start Your Business.

There are hundreds of books and blogs that tell the budding entrepreneur how to start and run a business and many of them are excellent. Unfortunately the reality is that when starting and running a business you’re more likely to spend your time making mistakes, dealing with problems and generally trying not to screw up.

So that’s what this blog is about - not screwing up. There’s no right way to run a business, but there are lots of wrong ways, by examining the mistakes that other entrepreneurs before you (myself included) have made, I aim to tell you how NOT to start and run your business. That way you’ll have a better chance of finding the right way to start and run your business.

Rarely do we like to admit to our failures, or the mistakes we’ve made, but by doing so we can learn from out mistakes and then each failure brings us closer to success.

If you’ve made a mistake in business that you think others should avoid and you’d like to share then please contact me and I’ll add your story.