Sink or Swim?
Turning your Big Idea in to your Big Thing takes up a lot of time, money, and energy. If you’re currently in another job/position/role, you’re probably nodding assent and smiling politely on the surface to colleagues, while on the inside starting to inhale those first, tentatively sweet breaths of exhilarating independence. It’s tempting to chuck in the towel, take a sledgehammer to the filing cabinet, and burst out that revolving door to sonic boom up…up…and awaaaaay to risk it all on a throw of the dice.
If you’re about to stand up and run, take a few breaths first and kindly sit the **** back down.
Like stopping momentarily to check the seatbelt is fastened, there are some pragmatic questions to ask prior to slamming pedal to metal and avoiding the increased possibility of ‘bumps in the road’ having adverse affects. Like the early demise of your business. Some considerations:
- Did I, uhh, write a business plan?
A common fallacy is that one writes a biz plan so potential investors will be super impressed when you sit down in front of them at an intimidating table. It’s not. It’s an exercise in self-assessment. A truthful missive to yourself that honestly lays out where you find yourself at this moment, and where you wish to get to. Whatever wonderful Thing you’re making, or service you’re providing, it’s still going to involve some form of this process:
a. I create X.
b. Others see and want X.
c. I give them X, and via some agreed method I receive something in return.
Yay! Trade is as easy as ABC!
However you analyze all the clever ways now available to manage a business, they all need to get to ‘C’ to keep moving. ‘B’ is the gas in the tank that makes it happen.
Let’s assume you’ve achieved ‘A’, and you have your Big Thing in mind. Pat yourself on the back. Go on. Now, the business plan is all about figuring what the ‘B’ entails. Given that we are now north of 7 billion people on this beautiful Rock, get over the fact, now, that there’s a strong mathematical possibility that somebody else on this same Rock may have had practically the same idea as you.
Now spend some time conducting a little competitive market analysis. Whose orbit would you be sharing in your target sector, and if you’re literally operating in the same street can you iterate your product so you’re complementary to theirs instead of directly competitive? Apparently this is now termed co-opetition, and means you start off as happy chums, then start a turf war later on when **** gets real. Are there alliances you can form early on that could potentially get your product out there in the community? Do you literally need to go back to the drawing board because your Thing is already being made elsewhere? Being honest and saying “I accept that those guys make what I thought I created, and they’re doing a bang up job of it” can be a painful but firm place to start. It’ll lead down a different path and you’ll have a fresh approach to things.
Set some goals, sketch out some objectives for your pathway over the next six months, first year, two years? These do not have to be somehow certified by a licensed ‘expert’. Who do you want to sell to, if you have the choice? By focussing on an early group of specific customers, you could capitalize on their respective capabilities in influencing others around them and growing your brand via word of mouth.
Hooray! Screw the ‘marketing budget’!
Your business plan is yours. It’s a living document you can come back to and change as you go along. Treat it like a diary. Tell it your dreams. Confide your secret ambitions. The more human and resembling of you it is, the more it will resound with your brand. Which, let’s face it, is just you right now. It’s going to prove extremely useful to go back and see how your aspirations were written down, and why/how they changed since then.
2. How to reduce dinero / cash / de l’argent / Geld / お金 / 钱?
What are your realistic financial expenses going to be? What’s your MVI (minimum viable income) that will keep you in top shelf ramen for the foreseeable? And…CRITICALLY…can you actually leave your current paid position to do this Thing full-time?
Perhaps one third of American workers now claim to be running some kind of ‘side hustle’. This is the lately popular and somewhat glamorized update for the previously used term ‘moonlighting’. Which ironically sounds way more glamorous, if not downright sultry. In its previous incarnation, this meant ‘putting food on the table’, or ‘paying for that college degree’. Hustle 2.0 comes equipped with a universe of tech solutions that can help you figure out how to best run your business, and thus how to reduce your $$ costs and turn this Thing in to your full-time schwagger. For a start, don’t hire an accountant! Your accounts will be really simple to begin with because you have no sales! Instead, use Zipbooks or Wave to get a handle on your bottom line. Investing in ‘solid’ desktop solutions often means being tied to the desk. Explore small business management and e-commerce apps, and give your time to banks that actually want to do business with you while you’re mobile. Aim to never every go inside a bank again! You don’t have time to be technology’s servant, so make it work around your needs. Figure out where to automate repetitive tasks so you can live in the promised tech nirvana of helpful machines.
To that point, being mobile means reliable service and a zero bull**** data plan. Comparison sites will help you snag the best deal, then challenge yourself to stay mobile as much as possible as an experiment in how you can effectively run your little empire, seeing where the $$ racks up and where it drops off. You may be surprised at how your habits change along the way.
Being a solo operator while your business is still fledgling offers the benefit of really assessing what’s required to ‘keep the lights on’, and what is excess in terms of real operational needs. It’s no different from a solid, formative chunk of personal travel in which you discover that half the crap you hauled along on your back wasn’t essential, and your biggest takeaway may have been starting to know your own differences between needs and wants. We now have the option of spending way beyond $1k for a mobile phone, but if it means ditching any notion of a physical office space and all its overheads, then how’re you gonna like them Apples?
3. I have terrible angst regarding leaving my comfort zone and embracing change. How…do…I…?
Mix it all up.
That’s the advice right there. Go on. Take all the habits and stuff and things you always do, and chuck ’em. Many will rebound back, surely. Some will dissipate in the ether of your temporary insanity. If you say to people “Oh, I aaaalwaaays go to the gym in the morning”, then maybe try the evening session. And sleep in the morning. Or vice versa. Or try not making such definitive statements to people that earmark you as somebody who ‘has it all thought out’ and is actually just resistant to change.
“Adaptation is the evolutionary process whereby an organism becomes better able to live in its habit or habitats.”
Marvelous. We are all adaptive creatures. Yet just watching an episode of The Office (US or UK versions both fine) will inform how easy it is for humans to languish in mutually reinforced patterns of the purely banal. Rage quietly against the machine of comfort and accept that, if you start your Big Thing up full-time, being adaptive as hell in multiple habitats may be your new Jive. It’s all part of the Gig Economy anyhow, and while we’re waiting for the psych research to conclusively define the effects of increased personal work ownership, distributed or remote working structures, and multiple micro income streams as the norm, I’m going to hazard a guess that it’s all a lot more invigorating than turning up at 9am, leaving at 6pm, and dying a little quicker in between. Moreover, the standard of coffee in most workplaces is, let’s face it, generally reprehensible.
Not. Good.
As before, getting oneself prepared for the unexpected is healthy. “Life goes and throws a curveball atCHA!”, they say. Well then go ahead and apply some rigorous baseball analogy to life and expect…wait…don’t expect.
Maybe after all this you’ll figure out that it’s neither sink nor swim. You can, with a little pragmatic forethought, test the waters and discover that floating is the acceptable middle ground. Floating right out of that office door on the inflatable donut of your well researched plans, and down the Lazy River of confidence to the realization of your Big Thing.
Working really, truly, honest-to-gosh mobile is a Big Thing of mine. It’s really damn tough to implement, and for human/social/family/company reasons above those of tech. I’ll be looking more at figuring out how to adapt tech and work around your Jive in coming posts.
