The Most Important Step in Any Business Venture: Just Start!

The following is adapted from This is It!

In the age of behemoths like Amazon and others, it might feel like starting a small business is not worth it. Like you’re destined to fail.

We’re here to tell you that’s not true. In fact, you can leverage what we call the anti-Amazon effect — that is, finding the cracks in the business models and offerings of large companies and offering what they can’t — to create opportunities. Even if you create a business that sells products in or around one of these giants, there’s a tremendous opportunity to not be them.

As Tony Robbins, one of the most prominent business coaches practicing today, once said, “Resourcefulness is the ultimate resource.” We believe in that wholeheartedly and have lived by that principle our entire lives.

If you want to succeed in business, though, resourcefulness isn’t all you’ll need. Leveraging the anti-Amazon effect isn’t all you’ll need. A solid product or service to build and sell isn’t all you’ll need. The ability to build a strong team and grow as a leader isn’t all you’ll need. A solid foundation of ethics and a dedication to business fundamentals isn’t all you’ll need.

Don’t misunderstand; you will need all those things. But not a damn thing we just mentioned matters if you don’t take the single most important step in any business venture: just start.

We know it’s easier said than done. We’ve been there.

Getting Started: Glenn’s Story

After World War II, my father, who took advantage of the GI bill, came out of the army and went right to college. When he graduated, he married my mother. They lived on the Upper West Side in Manhattan in a one-room tenement building. My father worked as a traveling salesman, but when they had my older brother, Bruce, he no longer wanted to travel around the country trying to sell goods.

The year was 1955, and suburbs were just beginning to emerge on Long Island. Together with my mother, my father conceptualized an idea: they’d get a van, they’d get housekeepers from Queens, and they’d drive them out to Long Island so they could clean the slew of new homes that were being built after World War II for returning soldiers and their families. Then, they’d pick them up in the afternoon and drive them back to their homes.

That little idea worked. They launched the first housekeeper delivery business, and it grew. And grew. When I graduated from Stony Brook University in May 1980, I didn’t take a single day off, eventually building the housekeeping company with my parents into one that spanned staffing nursing homes, training and placing home healthcare workers with the elderly and infirm, and building a personal emergency response division into the largest independent provider in the country. While preparing to sell the business, I launched Chart Organization, a real estate investment business, and later invested in Mixology, among many other businesses.

The point? Each one of those ventures, although different, has one thing in common: the drive to just start. At six years old, when I began delivering newspapers, I didn’t have it all figured out, but I moved forward anyway as a reckless kid (can you imagine this happening today?). By eleven, I had a small newspaper operation with three routes — a business. I was paying kids to work for me.

When Is the Best Time to Start?

There is no age limit on “just starting,” either. You don’t have to begin when you’re six. You can begin in your thirties, in your fifties — wherever you are right now. Many super successful people didn’t break out until they were in their thirties, forties, or even fifties — think of famous people like J.K. Rowling, Oprah, or Martha Stewart who have enterprises even bigger than their wildest dreams. They were six, they were twenty-one, they were thirty and had no idea what their futures held and more.

I’ve seen it happen: there’s a small food delivery company from Delray Beach called Delivery Dudes. I first noticed them when I saw a sign in a window above a retail store. It was started by one man, one delivery at a time. Three years later, every restaurant in Palm Beach County uses Delivery Dudes. Guess what? Amazon can deliver sandwiches, but they cannot build the local relationships with the restaurants like DD or the way a local business can. It’s not always easy, but it all starts with one delivery. One newspaper. One idea. One leap of faith.

Launching a Business: Jordan’s Story

About midway through college, I decided I wanted to start a T-shirt business. Back then, in the early 2000s, there was little clothing manufacturing happening in the United States. My father formed a relationship with a manufacturer from China, and he introduced me to him. I also had a college friend in Boston who told me he’d carry my line of shirts in his shop on Newbury Street. It felt like the perfect setup.

I’d been hungry and hustling all through college, always looking for opportunities to make money. I was a caddy, a Bar Mitzvah emcee, a caterer, and a bartender. I got my real estate license — anything I could do to make an extra buck, I did it.

As a business student, I set out doing what they teach you in class: writing a business plan, designing shirts, researching how to get an LLC, trying to understand the ins and outs of business insurance, figuring out whether or not I needed to open a bank account, running calculations about how much money I needed to raise to get the idea off the ground. You get the picture. The exploratory phase of my T-shirt business went on for weeks, then months. I hadn’t sold a single shirt, but I was working incredibly hard. Finally, my dad chimed in.

“Stop it,” he said. “Listen: make the shirt, sell the shirt. That’s business. Just start!”

It took time for me to come to understand that he was right. It was a hard truth. I wanted him to be wrong. I wanted to tell him all the reasons he was wrong and every reason I was right. But he was 100 percent right. I had to get out of my own head to take the next step. I’m not alone in this struggle, either; I have a friend who is a photographer. People tell me they see him all the time making flyers at a local office supply store. After the third person mentioned they saw my friend making copies, I ran into him myself.

“How often are you making flyers?” I asked him. “It seems like you’re doing it quite a bit.”

After talking with him, it became apparent he was doing everything for his business except photography. He was distracting himself from starting, from doing the actual work of going out and getting clients. In the business world, we all do this to some degree, and it can often be a bit of a wake-up call for someone to tell you to knock it off and just start. Just take the picture. Just make the T-shirt.

Running Toward Success

If this feels too conceptual, let me give you my real-life example of how I came to terms with getting started. When I launched Mixology, I felt lost and sometimes ill-equipped. After some mistakes and some hard-won lessons, I set out to learn from those who had excelled in their lives, such as Tony Robbins, Warren Buffett, Joe Rogan, Ryan Holiday, Jesse Itzler, David Goggins, and Casey Neistat. I listened to podcasts and read voraciously.

I found a common thread that united some of the most successful people of our time: running. I grew up always playing sports like lacrosse, soccer, tennis, and golf, but I hated running. I’d never run more than a mile in my life, but I set my mind to it then. If a love of running was a theme among those consistently at the top of their games, I was going to do it, too. Even if it was hard.

And it was.

The first time I attempted a jog with my wife (at the time fiancée) — an avid runner — I made it three quarters of a mile and was in excruciating pain, on the verge of tears because the experience was so humbling. But I didn’t quit. Instead, I told her I was going to run every day until our wedding, four months away at the time.

And I did.

The second day wasn’t much better from a pain standpoint, but I made it almost a mile. Each day became slightly easier until, on the thirteenth day — after never having run more than a mile in my life — I ran five miles. I accomplished this feat not because I was naturally good at running, but because I showed up every day anyway, even when it was hard, and I made progress.

The same grind I made on that pavement is one you’re going to make in your business every day. Sometimes, you’ll want to cry. You’ll be in pain. The wind won’t always be at your back, and circumstance will slow you down. One day, though, after the compounding effects of your daily effort, you’ll look back and realize you’re actually in business. You made it, all because you had the courage to just start.

The funny thing? After the first few weeks of running daily, my runs turned from feeling painful to feeling like medicine. I got in a rhythm. I realized I’d never hated running; I was simply scared of it because I didn’t excel at it right away. This is one of the scariest things you will have to do.

Understand that there is fear holding you back from achieving your goals. It wasn’t the runs themselves — it was my ego. It was fear. When I had the courage to admit I wasn’t comfortable and move forward anyway into the unknown, improving day after day, I reached the finish line I set for myself.

Believing in Yourself and Your Business

To be a successful entrepreneur, you must ask yourself how much you truly believe in yourself and your business. The world will try to tell you to stand in line, to conform. It will try to tell you that you’ll never make it. That 99 percent of new businesses fail. That you don’t have what it takes.

We’re here to tell you the world is wrong — but you have to believe it, too. David Goggins, US Navy Seal, for example, used to weigh 300 pounds. Now, he is a fitness inspiration, writing on Facebook, “On your bad days, when you feel like a tortured soul, that is when you can really win the battle against yourself! If, on your worst days you can pull off your best performances, that’s when your mind truly starts to shift! Win that battle and it will move the mental needle!”

Yes, you will fail at times. You will fall down. But, as the often-cited, anonymous quote, says, “When a child learns to walk and falls down fifty times, he never thinks to himself, ‘maybe this isn’t for me.’”

If you lace up every day and move forward confidently in the belief that you’re going to be in the 1 percent that makes it, one day you’ll look back and realize all those small steps paid off. Just start!

For more advice on starting your business, you can find This is It! on Amazon.

Jordan Edwards is the president of Mixology Clothing Co., a Long Island-based fashion retailer with a robust web presence and ten brick and mortar locations. He is also a real estate entrepreneur and investor, an avid reader, and a Brazilian jiu-jitsu athlete. Glenn Edwards is a seasoned, service-minded business leader who grew a family home healthcare firm into one of the largest on the East Coast. Today, his investment company, Chart Organization, LLC, has multiple holdings. Glenn is the author of a previous book, Coming into Your Own, and he serves alongside his children, Jordan and Gabrielle, at Mixology.