What one piece of advice would you wish you were told when you first started out in your business? Me... I wish i knew how many hats i am expected to where. e.g. HR, worker, tea maker, plant waterer... NextBigLeap
Cracking question! Hmmm, in hindsight, slow down! Take a well planned slow approach, learning valuable lessons along the way. I burned through far too much money in the early days, mainly due to total inexperience, not fully understanding my market and poor planning. When you finally get the experience, you realise you've run out of money!  If you can survive this phase without going pop, then you've cracked it 
“Cracking question! I burned through far too much money in the early days, mainly due to total inexperience, not fully understanding my market and poor planning.” What areas did you waste money on? NextBigLeap
How much text can I get in this box? Advertising and Marketing, completely unfocused with no marketing plan, we wasted a fortune on things like radio  Following traditional directory models, setting up a sales team, doing outbound cold sales, having never had any experience in selling or running a sales team. Which led to high overheads, wages, office, phone bills etc... plus admin burden of employing youngsters, and thinking we could train them ourselves... Then outsourcing to a call centre... the list goes on... But got there in the end, we stopped selling and let people come to us, and haven't looked back I just seem to have a natural ability to do everything the hard way 
Its experiences like this that make us who we are, so i wouldnt say it was wasted. I have learned a few things the hard way and this has made me more rounded and sensible when it comes to business. NextBigLeap
“...I have learned a few things the hard way and this has made me more rounded and sensible when it comes to business.” Your turn, pray tell
My biggest lesson was when i first started out (2003) and taking on projects without any formal process or documentation. No formal spec, or contracts, this left me far too exposed and I would inevitably end up working on projects twice as long as i should have. Therefore i would lose out on every project. When realisation hit, I started to turn work away as I felt it would drag me back to the way it was in the early days and only took on projects that took my service seriously and no longer saw me as cheap labour. NextBigLeap |
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