Building Your Business With No Money
The two excuses I most commonly hear from entrepreneurs involve two areas: time and money.
We’re all too busy. We just don’t have time.
We’re broke. We don’t have the money to do what we really want.
There’s validity in both excuses, but a lack of either resource is no reason to give up.
I’ll talk about the time issue in the weeks ahead, but let’s discuss the money one today.
On some level, when you say “I don’t have enough money”, what you’re really saying is, “I don’t have enough money now, but I believe I will someday.”
At some point in the future, you will have the resources to hire the people you want, pay for the gear you need, or invest in your business to the fullest extent. And while that might be true, it doesn’t mean you have to wait to do amazing things.
Case in point, Anthropologie.
If you’ve never been in one of their stores, imagine if Whole Foods and Lush Cosmetics had a baby.
It’s fancy, Coachella-type clothing.
The stores are absolutely gorgeous and anyone with a physical sales location should study what they do. Here’s a photo from the one near me in Franklin, TN.
The display over the bed was stunning. My photo isn’t great, but from different angles, the sculpture seems to float, hanging there suspended in color and motion.
Do you know what the best part is? Store employees built it.
What did they use? Dyed clothespins.
That’s all it is. String and cheap wooden clothespins. The employees build most of the displays in the store. Instead of shipping expensive containers of art to each store, the brand asks their employees to be artists. It’s a lot cheaper to design it once, create instructions and then have team members buy clothespins.
Does Anthropologie have money? They do. If you’ve ever bought one of their items of clothing, you know they have cash. They could spend a lot of money on the displays or they could do it on the cheap and still have it be stunning.
My point is this: there will always be a time and place for investing money into your business, but never be ashamed of finding a cheap way to do something.
Get scrappy. Get creative. Hustle and save money so you can free up more funds for the things that really matter, like employees.
That’s where you want to spend money.
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