5 Business Tips For Young People Wanting to Become Entrepreneurs
KodyPay is a business that was founded and created by a group of teenagers in 2018. Three years later (now), we are lucky to be in a position where we are infiltrating the financial world and only growing in success. As a company founded by young people, we seek to support young adults in their journey to entrepreneurship. Young people are in the best position to begin brainstorming business ideas. They do not need to worry about bills, they are fresh-faced, and they are not yet bogged down by the troubles that adult life entails. So use that position to come up with the most creative ideas yet. Teenagers are the next generation. They know what they want and will be the heart of society in years to come. So spend those years in preparation, and you may be referred to as the “Gen Z Prodigy of Wall Street” like KodyPay’s, Yoyo Chang.
What can you gain from becoming an entrepreneur apart from being your own boss? 54% of entrepreneurs make more money now than in any other job they worked in. The hardest year is the first year, but 80% of small businesses survive their first year. These 5 top tips have been compiled to help advise any young person looking to kickstart their dream career.
1. Research
There are 582 million entrepreneurs in the world. If you want to be part of that number, do your research! This is the most important step. If you do not research, then your idea may have already been executed in the way that you plan on doing so. You may be a copycat. You may end up spending time and money on creating something that people do not want.
Knowing where to start with such a big task of researching can be overwhelming. Start with an area that you are interested in. Research a broad topic, and in time your focus will shift towards the specific niche that you like. To create and run a successful business, you must do something that you are passionate about. Otherwise, it will never survive.
Once you have discovered your niche topic, begin to research what other companies who also look at this topic have done. This is called finding your brand and USP. USP stands for your unique selling point. You are researching the other companies to find a gap in the market, which is where your brand will sit. As you research a company, you should look for what the customers like or, more importantly, don’t like about them. Find out what the customer wants. If you are providing a unique service that people are asking for and not currently getting, you are 95% more likely to be successful. Ask yourself: what can I provide that all these other companies can’t?
Yoyo Chang and his team did this for his KodyPay. Our USP is that we make the complicated payment process simple: all elements are incorporated into one app for merchants. Unlike other mobile payment methods, KodyPay incorporates foreign payment methods, such as Alipay for Chinese nationals. The company seeks to reduce your carbon footprint by removing paper receipts and bulk hardware, such as tills. The company incorporates a whole host of unique selling points to aid both customers and merchants, which many of its competitors do not. What makes you different from other businesses in your field?
2. Set Realistic Goals
In order to do well, you must set goals. Without an end goal, you are much more likely to procrastinate and work with a sense of aimlessness. But by creating sensible goals and deadlines, your work day has a sense of urgency and purpose, which should motivate you to work hard. However, setting the goals of “I want to be a young entrepreneur” is an unhelpful goal. Your goal must be specific and attainable. Don’t just set a goal, but specify how you will achieve it. For example, if you want to gain more experience, you should set a goal to contact a certain number of experts in your field.
Set daily, weekly, and monthly goals. All that point towards your main goal of growing your business. Your daily goals should include specific tasks, working towards the aims of the week. For example, your weekly plan could be to create a project plan. One daily plan for that week will be to research project plans. Another will be drafting, another formatting and editing, another the final complete work. Each daily goal here works towards the weekly goal. If your goals are general, or you don’t have weekly and daily aims, your work will be slow, and a small focussed task will become a long drawn out half-hearted job.
When setting goals, a fault of many is to create goals that are not in a person’s control. Something like creating a hashtag that goes viral is out of your control because that is reliant on other people using the hashtag. A more realistic goal would be to create and directly drive the use of a hashtag that people engage with and use in relation to your business. Since you are the one creating the hashtag, this goal is in your control.
Your goals must be challenging to keep you engaged, but not impossible. For example, setting the goal to gain 500, 000 followers on your business Instagram account in one week is not realistic. However, aiming to grow your following by 1000 a week is attainable, as well as a challenge, which will need your attention. When you set your goal, you must also probe as to why. Why are you sharing images on Instagram? Is it benefiting and growing your business? What information are you sharing, and to who? Is your goal to simply get followers and likes, or is it to get engaged customers? Would you be more successful if you spent that time contacting press companies and influencers directly? These are questions that only you can answer based on the aims of your business.
When the company started out, we had big dreams. But we took everything day by day. By setting smaller goals within our overall vision of the company, we were able to grow KodyPay exceptionally quickly from scratch. As your business grows, your goals will also likely grow! Don’t worry about starting small: take those steps, enjoy the process, and watch your creative ideas grow into a strong business.
3. Organise, Motivate, Move
Being a young entrepreneur means being your own boss. Unlike school, this means no one is telling you what to do. There are no deadlines and no direct consequences for not working. However, if you do not stick to your goals, your business will suffer and struggle to survive. Owners of start-ups claim that managing their businesses is four times more stressful than working as an employee. So get organised. It can be easy to distract yourself when you have no one telling you what to do and when to do it. So set yourself daily tasks and deadlines. Schedule work times and break times. This will give your day structure and motivate you to move.
To be motivated, you need to stop talking about what you are going to do and actually get on with doing it. Statistics show that the more someone shares their idea, the less likely they are to follow through with it. This is because a person gets a high from the affirmation and praise of their idea, which carries them. Instead, seek praise for the actual product of your thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. The way to do that is to get creating, get moving, and get it done.
Motivation breeds motivation. This is a challenging concept because it means that once someone loses their motivation, it can be hard to gain back. Therefore, if you are not feeling motivated, do not wait until you are feeling productive. Move anyway. That feeling will not come unless you take the initial step. So be dedicated, and be harsh on yourself. If you are not in the mood to work, work anyway. Stick diligently to your structure, and that sense of achievement will spark your motivation to keep going. Keep your mind focussed on your goals, and move step by step closer.
Being a young person means that your life and finances do not depend on the success and failure of your company. So stop wasting time on perfecting everything, but learn as you go. This doesn’t mean don’t plan. You must have a strategy and clear idea of what you want to achieve and how it will happen. But once you have done that, move. Your time is valuable and being young, you have the gift of time. So do not waste it.
The team at KodyPay speak about the importance of trial and error as they started to grow the company at only 18 years old. Mistakes are unavoidable, but they are important to grow, refine, and fines the business. Everything should be looked at as an important learning experience. So trust the process and keep pushing through to overcome.
4. Consider the company you keep
Something very important to keep in mind is who you surround yourself with. These are the people who influence you the most. Therefore, spending time with them will impact you on your journey to entrepreneurship. A person becomes the average of the 5 people they spend most of their time with. So spend time with those who encourage you and support your business.
It is well known that the best way to grow in a skill is to spend time with someone who is more experienced than you. You wouldn’t get singing lessons from someone who can’t sing, so why would you get support from someone who isn’t a business owner? Become friends with those mature and knowledgeable in your field. They can guide and offer you wisdom and advice. To set about seeking guidance and gaining a mentor is much less intimidating than it seems. Remember that your idols are still humans. If you draft and follow up on an email to them, most will be more than happy to help support a young person in their journey. Research these people and express your enthusiasm towards their work. They remember the challenges they faced themselves, making them willing and excited to share their knowledge.
As well as the importance of growing your contacts, it is also important to prune your surroundings of unsupportive people. Your time is precious, and your journey to becoming a business owner will have challenges enough. The last thing you need is to also be fighting for your business in an unsupportive environment — work then becomes an uphill battle. Positive people uplift and elevate you, whereas negative people will drag you down with them. As harsh as it may sound, carefully consider and critique your company as if your life depends on it. The future of your business does. The future of your life experience does.
As young entrepreneurs, KodyPay’s founders recognise the utmost importance of surrounding yourself with the right people. They surrounded themselves with other business men and women who advised, nurtured, and supported them in their journey to success. These people were crucial early on to provide a space for the team to cultivate original and creative ideas.
5. Believe in yourself
You must believe in yourself. Starting your own business and becoming an entrepreneur will be filled with challenges, setbacks, and mistakes. But instead of beating yourself up over the mistakes, count them as winning learning experiences. Mistakes are part of the process and essential for your improvement. As soon as you realise that failure is temporary, your negative thoughts will fall away. Stop wasting time by doubting and second guessing yourself. Just because something hasn’t been done does not mean it is wrong — you should be actively seeking to create something brand new. Take the opportunity as a young person to try new things.
90% of people who created a new year’s resolution have already failed, and it’s not even February. This failure is due to a lack of faith in oneself. Believing in yourself is a critical path to success. By creating a positive attitude towards yourself, you are one step closer to achieving your goals.
Although you have already surrounded yourself with the right people, only you can inspire yourself. A step to growing your self-confidence is to speak to yourself like a champion. Voice your thoughts with certainty, and your ideas will flourish. This will build your self-belief and value, as well as increase your courage to create and implement new and inventive ideas. Trusting yourself will empower you to think outside the box and to step out of your comfort zone in order to create a successful business for yourself. These ideas will form the foundation of your business, which will lead to success.
Yoyo Chang has always backed himself. Being young and inexperienced means that you have a lot to prove to others — they can’t look at your employment history because it will be minimal. So you have to have confidence in yourself. If you approach all situations with certainty in yourself, then you can do anything you set your mind to.
There is more to running a business than just the 5 steps. However, you cannot run a business without them. These 5 steps are essential for a young person to consider when seeking entrepreneurship. If you research your niche, set achievable goals, organise and motivate yourself, surround yourself with support from others and yourself, then you are more than ready to begin the road to success.
