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Start a Business from scratch to success
Today I want you to answer one simple question would you start a business knowing that when you have covid when you feel bad but you have a team who relies on you have a product. Would you have enough motivation to stand up dress put your makeup on and go and hustle in your business? crossorigin="anonymous">
Because when we see entrepreneurs we get inspired by this fancy lifestyle Maybach with a driver going to a party but this is one percent of your time 99% of your time is actual work 10% of your time. Well, this is based on my experience 10% of the time you don't want to do anything.
You want to be in bed on youtube my business and I love it so so much I don't want to miss a week without an upload. So whenever I want to start something new I ask myself if would I have the same passion as I have for this channel would I get out of my bed take my camera and create content.
If yes then that business is for me and if you said yes then continue reading this article we're gonna talk about starting a business in 2022 let's do it.
1. You’re an entrepreneur, not a manager
Let's continue talking about business way youtube is something that I dedicate a lot of my time I have a seven people team for my videos and also have 10 people team for my youtube school and we also have 60 people at language herb.
I was active when we started the company and I was active in the first I would say nine years of the business in the past two years we've built a great team.
So that I don't have to be as involved as I used to be and this is the goal with any business it's important right from the start to remember that when you're starting a business you're an entrepreneur, not a manager.
This is something that took me years to learn because I was like. If I start a business,
- I would need to hire people myself
- I would need to manage everything myself
- I would need to do this and that but in reality
If we ask jeff Bezos hey jeff do you file your business taxes yourself or do you hire every single person yourself using of course not because if you do that you can't focus on the strategy.
But this is what happens in the long run so at the beginning you have to be ready to do ever almost everything for your business but I want you to remember that in the first years you would need to learn how to make this transition from.
You know managing everything yourself to hiring talented folks to do what you're not that good at so you can focus on the strategy.
2. Do this before starting your business
Now I know a lot of people who are like okay I'm leaving my company by my boss. I'm gonna start my own business now and then a year later they're like okay I need that health insurance is there a place for me to come back to the company.
I know those people and the thing is I understand because you think to start a business I need to have this free time to think about the low-cost business idea. I need to have the bandwidth to start doing something but what I've realized over the years and I started some ventures.
Like I started doing things but I realized it's super important to start something part-time like 30 minutes a day then see how it progresses and when you see certain traction when you understand that oh I'm going to be there even when problems happen I'm going to make it.
If I have covid because I'm so passionate about it this is when you start leaving your job another method is saving up money but again from my experience the FIRST YEAR IS THE HARDEST. So it may take you a year to get to the first revenue it might take you a year to pivot from one business idea to another.
And only after that year you would realize you okay this is where we are so if you're quitting your job have enough money to support yourself for a year if you're not quitting your job then it might take you a while a year or more to quit it later to dedicate all your time to your business.
3. 3 strategies of starting a business
Now let's talk about actually starting a business you can start with one of these three things,
- You can start with solving a particular problem
- You can start by researching your target audience or
- You can start with marketing without even having a product
Best CRM for your business
I'm gonna give you an action plan for all three things. When you start a new business you're gonna face a lot of challenges but one of the most important things uh is building systems for everything. You do in your business right from the start.
I can go on for hours how I used a spreadsheet to manage our client base and when we had hundreds of customers it was so hard to come up with a tailored offer because I didn't have any notes of how we communicated and what they were interested in.
So something I tell everyone who's asking me about starting a business these days I say has the systems right from the start and investing in the right CRM solution to organize your customer relations is quite simple.
There is a brand new CRM solution from Zoho called BEGIN that can help you with this and it's built only for small businesses begin by Zoho CRM helps businesses manage leads and contacts track the stages of every deal stay on top of to-do's and keep all your interactions with your customers in one place.
The thing is if you have this spreadsheet it wouldn't follow up with your customers it wouldn't say happy birthday. Here's your discount you would be kind of able to group them but those groups won't be dynamic.
This is the tip of the iceberg and this is what BEGIN can help you with. BEGIN is light agile and effortless anyone can set it up from scratch and get started in 30 minutes or less if you're starting a business for the first time and you've never worked with a CRM before don't worry.
You don't need any prior experience to use begin. Begin lets you pick a template that's tailor-made for your business and you can start beginning having many pipelines for business operations like sales marketing communications.
They have built-in telephony with the ability to buy a toll-free number or a local number. So you could know that a customer is calling you and picking up the phone and saying oh,
Hi, James uh good to hear from you it helps you with task management and scheduling meetings you can create and automate workflows to automate many of your day-to-day tasks and provide complete customer contacts from emails and calls to tweets.
So you can always keep up with your customers and contacts. You can make begin work with almost 2 000 different apps that you use every day like,
- Zoom
- Mailchimp
- Workspace
- Microsoft office
They have mobile apps for iPhone android they also have a desktop app for MacBook users it costs seven dollars a month per user making it one of the most affordable crms ever and also has a forever free plan.
STRATEGIES
1. Problem
Starting with the problem is the easiest especially if you have this problem and this is something that we've done with our first business. I was a student who wanted to travel abroad realized it's super expensive there are so many agencies doing this and they all charge like 400 bucks for providing the service.
I was like okay how can I solve this problem how can I make education abroad more accessible to people like me who don't have tens of thousands of dollars for a short trip abroad. So I started doing my research and started exploring if you're starting with a problem.
There is something important you need to remember to check the market size because sometimes if we have this problem then a lot of people actually have this problem but sometimes you realize there is the market and with our problem, we realize there is a market.
It was like a nine billion dollar market which is kind of big. So you need to ask yourself what is my goal where I'm going there am I going to be raising money from venture capitalists or do I just want to build a lifestyle business.
So I would say a nine billion dollar market which I think kind of shrank with covid. So with that kind of market, I would say it's more of a lifestyle but it depends, and then how passionate you are about solving this problem how passionate you are.
Because sometimes you're like oh I have this problem but then you saw it it's like this thing when people go and uh become therapists they get an education just to solve their problem and once they get this education they're like I don't want to work with other people I sold my problems I want to move on.
So don't make that mistake don't build something big to solve a problem for yourself only to realize you know the problem is. So now I don't want to help other people solve the problem and the way to test it is to help other people first.
Another question that you should ask yourself is there a solution already and why is it not working?
And here I want you to be self-confident because when I checked whether there was a solution to the problem that I mentioned studying abroad there were hundreds of agencies just in my city alone doing that but I was so passionate.
I just felt this energy inside me and I was like I want to solve this problem I can do better than them I am different and I didn't know what my difference was but I realized this energy can make something on the market and this is where I want you to be more self-confident.
Even if you see a lot of competition but you feel that it's you who has to solve this problem go ahead because of what I've learned from being in the business for over 10 years.
The winner is not the one who was there first. The winner is not the one who has the most money.
The winner is the one who's the most passionate about the problem.
Who's willing to work more hours who's willing to come up with weird solutions and who's willing to change the world because he's so passionate about the problem.
2. Audience
That is the most important thing sometimes people take another approach they're like okay I want to be doing something for this particular target audience this can be very tempting especially on youtube.
When you start a new channel you're like I want to do something in finance because the cpms are so high it could be a strategy but you have to.
In my opinion, you have to be genuinely want to become a part of that audience to feel their problems or you need to work closely with someone who is part of that audience.
And here I can talk about my friend who was never really passionate about studying abroad who was never really passionate about learning languages but he saw me being a part of that audience he also noticed that I'm not too entrepreneurial.
Like I didn't start my own business before I met him but he was entrepreneurial he was like okay I see you part of the audience here's the problem let's fix it. So if you feel that you're an entrepreneur but you're not that type of entrepreneur who's like oh I'm super passionate about it.
You know e-commerce or helping bloggers and I don't want to become a blogger myself but I'm a good entrepreneur I can hire people I can form a team then you need to identify who is that person who's going to be your co-founder who feels the problem and you will be the one building a team around them.
3. Marketing
The last strategy I wanted to talk about in this video might have sounded super counter-intuitive back in 2011 when I started my first business but it's starting with marketing. This means starting with producing content for your target audience,
- Building an email list
- Building a youtube channel
- Building an Instagram account
- Building a TikTok account
And then figuring out what your business is and that itself building an audience can become a lucrative business like you see all the YouTubers bragging or sharing how much they made last year making videos on youtube and this strategy is something that you can start right away.
Something you can start today and um what they say in us these days no email list no sales and I believe it so something that you can start working on right now is building your email list identifying your target audience thinking about the problem.
You can solve and meanwhile deliver something valuable for your audience growing it learning it and getting ready to start your very first business.
Conclusion
So guys in this article I want to tell you about how to start a business from scratch to succeed in life. If you follow these steps I am sure that you are successful in life. If this article is helpful for you leave a comment below and share your opinions.
