4 stappen om een ​​succesvol bedrijf te starten.

Een paar maanden geleden was ik zo gestrest dat ik het gevoel had dat ik een korset droeg. Mijn borst was strak gespannen, mijn schouders zo gespannen dat ze op rotsen leken. Het was al een jaar zo, een constante intensieve brand om projecten voor mijn werk af te maken. De beloning? Een salaris en meer van hetzelfde de volgende maand. Op een dag zei mijn vriendin me dat ik moest stoppen. Verlaten. "Je bent slim genoeg, je komt er wel uit. Ga gewoon weg en zoek uit hoe je kunt doen wat je wilt doen ".

Ik heb nu meerdere bedrijven onder mijn riem en verdien meer dan 100.000 euro per jaar aan inkomsten. Ze voeren het gamma uit van fysieke bedrijven tot IT-producten online en consulting. De winstmarges variëren, maar elk daarvan zou genoeg zijn om me comfortabel te maken. Als u hetzelfde wilt doen, is dit artikel iets voor u.

De vier stappen om een ​​bedrijf op te bouwen:

1. 1Vind pijn.
2. 2Bouw / vind een oplossing voor de pijn.
3. 3Laat mensen meer betalen voor de oplossing dan het kost om te produceren.
4. 4Herhaal en schaal.

Ik heb zoveel boeken over ondernemerschap en heel veel artikelen gelezen, maar eigenlijk maken ze het allemaal veel te ingewikkeld of veel te simpel. U zult merken dat er niets is over VC, of ​​bedrijfsplannen, of pitches, of iets anders op die lijst.

Because those do not matter. Hear that? Writing up business plans doesn’t matter (though it can help if you pay attention to the points below). Venture capital doesn’t matter. A “great" idea doesn’t matter. Your idea doesn’t have to be brilliant or special or unique or anything. It can be simple and common and done before and that’s totally fine. Some ideas may need a lot of capital and people but frankly — they are the worst ideas. You spend a lot of time pitching, looking for investment, finding partners, etc. Those businesses get a lot of glory in the news but the truth is they absolutely suck as approaches for the vast majority of people. Especially if it’s your first time.

Did you go to Stanford/Berkley/MIT/Yale and do you know a bunch of rich people? No? Then ignore all the crazy VC driven crap. Here’s how to be an entrepreneur the sane way.

1. Finding Pain

Pain in this sense is pretty broad. I own the #1 coffee shop in Da Nang, Vietnam along with my girlfriend. Do you know the pain it solves? It solves the pain of digital nomads wanting a good place to work that has great coffee and doesn’t charge them $10 as a “coworking space" when they walk in the door. That’s the pain. We sell the best coffee, fantastic food, and the price is reasonable. The chairs are comfy and we have two ISPs. Really we don’t sell coffee at all, we sell the experience that is the coffee shop. Selling the coffee is just the monetization system.

Not exactly the most important pain in the world, but it is a pain. If you are a digital nomad like I was it’s one you feel daily. And for the people who have that pain they happily pay — day in, day out, day after day as our customers come back again and again and again. How many physical businesses are profitable immediately? Revenues exceeded operation costs our very first month. We recovered the investment capital in 3 months.

The better you get at finding and solving pain efficiently, the better you will do.

2. Build/Find a solution to pain

I want to give a universal piece of advice: Be as lazy as possible here as you can. Working hard at building and finding solutions will be the death of you. If you have to work your ass off to solve the problem it means that steps 3 and 4 are going to be even harder. If you want to make real money at business that’s just not acceptable. Lazy doesn’t mean doing a shit job, it means focusing 100% on the stuff that you do best that moves the needle the most.

Don’t think for a minute you have to build everything yourself. Creative partnerships and alliances allow you to spread the effort around. Some of the best solutions out there will be win-win scenarios where you help related businesses and they help you.

You want to focus on your most powerful value-ad for your solution and nothing else. The thing you can do best, provide the most efficiently, the highest impact thing you can find.

Coffee Shop example: I live in asia where there are 5 coffee shops on every block. Most are empty, mine is full. Why? Because we am selling coffee as an experience, and my experience is carefully tailored to the right customers. We aren’t “just" a coffee shop. The same approach applies to any business.

IT Services example: I focused not on providing “IT services" but on a specific niche customer with clear needs and a clear budget. I ignored people with lower budgets AND the ones with higher budgets. I provide precisely what they need at the exact price they can afford. I wasn’t cheap, I was actually at the high end — but they could afford it and it was perfect so the sale got made.

I’m not claiming this is easy. It isn’t. Finding the right pain and the right solution is as much an art as anything else, takes practice, and is failure prone.

In business school, they will teach you about Porter’s Generic Strategies for business. In short, those are having a better focus for a client, differentiation, and price superiority. As a general rule, I suggest you avoid having a pricing focus as your key approach. That doesn’t mean ignore pricing entirely, but if being cheaper is your only claim to fame then you are going to have a bad time. Sometimes that’s ok but only if “but I’m cheaper" comes with “and I can scale like mad". Whatever your solution, being cheaper should be the last on your customer’s list for reasons to buy from you. Be different, be specific, and then making pricing palatable. For the right solution to the right people — they will pay. Which leads us to item 3.

3. Sell the solution for more than it costs you to produce

This is the only place where a good idea even sort of matters. Being clever at monetization can be real secret sauce for businesses. For instance, there are land developers who open shops — bakeries, bars, etc, and operate them at a loss. It makes no sense until you realize that this revitalization doubles the price of the land those businesses sit on. Then the developer flips the land for millions. Their balance sheet looks like this:

Buy land: -$10,000,000
Create shops: -$2,000,000
Sell land: $20,000,000

All those shops were money losers. Millions down the drain, but it didn’t matter because the monetization wasn’t in the shops but in the culture and perception of being an “up and coming" area. They start the gold rush, buyers rush in to catch the development wave and the developer cashes out.

What pain were they solving? Well, people want to be in the next ‘up and coming’ area. People want to buy housing where they feel property values will seriously appreciate. Once this starts to happen, they get “FOMO" — fear of missing out. And buying up that newly expensive land means they didn’t feel the pain of missing out. BOOM, money.

If you are thinking “yeah but I don’t have 12 million bucks" then that’s fair enough. But who said YOU had to have the 12 million? Most developers don’t even spend their own money. Their monetization model is to coral investors into a group that has the money in some investment LLC, and then manage the project for a cut while taking minimal financial risk. Those lazy, good for nothing, very profitable bastards. The smart ones manage to pay the investors, give the LLC a loss, and then make that loss provide something extra on top with tax games. Be more like them.

Their genius business idea basically boils down to “Buy some land and then sell it when people will pay more for it". The genius isn’t in the business idea, but the monetization and delivery model.

4. Repeat and Scale

Depending on the business this step may be optional but for the vast majority of businesses it’s the difference between “hey I made a few bucks doing this thing" and making REAL money.

This step can be divided into two sub-steps:

1. 1Creating a repeatable system for sales that doesn’t require you.
2. 2Creating a repeatable system for delivery that doesn’t require you.

In every business you need some way of making the sale and some way of delivering your product or service. And for both of these, being creative can be very helpful. I can’t stress enough that a “great idea for a business" is mostly irrelevant but great ideas for sales and delivery can be very lucrative. And these great ideas don’t require you to have an MBA, be a software engineer, have a 200IQ, or anything.

The part about “doesn’t require you" is critical. Anything that requires you isn’t something that can scale and will cease to repeat the moment you take a vacation, get sick, etc. A real business needs to be stronger than that.

How to get started?

So what can you do if you are totally stuck on finding pain. First, I would suggest analyzing existing businesses. Is there one you like OK but you think could be a lot better? Where are you unhappy as a customer?

If there is a business out there that is doing well but you think it’s “just ok" then that’s pain that isn’t being dealt with and presents opportunity. A better coffee shop, better hammer, better t-shirt, these are all totally banal but 100% valid businesses. I’m not kidding about the hammer either — Snap On will sell you a $30 hammer and for the right people, it’s worth every penny.

If you have the capital, it’s 100% worth it to try buying an existing business. For online businesses, Flippa.com is a marketplace where people sell Amazon, shopify, and other businesses. My suggestion is to buy a small business that has revenue that you can get for cheap and see if you can improve it. There is plenty of BS here so be careful, and take everything as a learning experience (including the possible event of buying a dud you didn’t expect). This is something you can do on the side while learning about marketing and promotion. Some of the systems you will need for sales and delivery will be done for you, some will not. This will keep things from being overwhelming all at once and without investing a ton of money. Even if your purchase doesn’t result in profits, you should think of it as cheap tuition to business building school.

The same pattern works with real life businesses. My GF and I bought the coffee shop we run. We learned what worked, what didn’t, and took something that was basically functional and just worked on improving the systems. We re-arranged furniture for more space. We added things to the menu, we tried different marketing promotions (the sales system) we hired different staff (delivery system), we partnered with new people (scaling), found better suppliers (sell for more than it costs to provide), etc.

You can build a successful business. And the easiest way to do that is to realize that business is a skillset that can be learned and that almost none of the stuff you hear or see in articles (especially in tech) has anything to do with real success. Real success is just getting those 4 steps right. Not even perfect, good enough will do.

It takes practice, so fail as cheap as you can in time and money to learn. That means avoid anything fancy, and just work on those 4 steps over and over. Don’t worry at all about a clever business idea, but think and think and think over different sales, delivery, and monetization strategies. That’s where the magic happens. The reason most people fail in business is because they think they need (or think they have) some amazing business idea. That just isn’t necessary.

Go out, make it happen, and then go live like this:

About Brenn

Brenn is an entrepreneur and digital nomad who loves good coffee, metal music, and takes a freedom-over-everything approach to life. He currently lives on a beach in Asia making more money than he can spend.

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