Good to know that you have embarked on the journey.
I have been sailing in the seas of entrepreneurship for 10 years. I have expanded and Now I am doing two businesses. I am hoping to get one more soon. It can be rough and fierce at times but overall it has been fine. Your life has totally changed. You may have a deal that’s financially good for a year or some years OR you may sit idle for a while. Stay positive.
One piece of advice for you, don’t stick so much with so called business analyses, you might have learned from your business education, for all of your decision making. I am not saying those analyses are useless but passion and irrationality are probably two qualities of each entrepreneur. That said, have an exit strategy for yourself. If you cannot sustain your living for some time, cut loose from that.
Good luck !
Thanks for your advice! It's nice to get advice from more senior entrepreneurs. I'm in the sitting idle time right now. Not a lot of "big moves" which is good for me. It was a hard transition from the adrenaline of building to the more stable place of maintaining and tweaking.
The success I've seen in my businesses have come from being able to balance my irrationality, passion and business education. I've always had a hard time with structure and very much run on the irrational path. Adding the business education was what weathered the hard times of crunching numbers to survive. When the bad times come it's nice to count on well tailored books to take part of the blow. That being said I am often appear the more rational one among my entrepreneur friends so I could look at that.
Thanks again for your comment! I enjoyed it.
If possible, define and document each internal process, say, define a service/product blueprint. Why? you may standardize business processes and when your business grows bigger, you'll hire someone and each person hired can do things in a desirable way.
Stick with down-to-earth business theories and techniques only, some of those theories and techniques you have learned are NOT for small businesses.
Capitalize on every online marketing opportunity, if you have a website, try having search engine optimization (some techniques in planning and executing how keywords related to your products/services are scattered in each paragraph, each post and each webpage section across your website), you can do some research about search engine optimization and do it yourself, it is not that hard. With search engine optimization, you may save a lot $ from online marketing because organic searches can probably bump you up onto top of the page. Also, use hashtags to post on IG and FB.
Microsoft Office Accounting Express was free back then, but don't know if it is still now. Full package, very simple but powerful accounting software to keep your books. If this software is not available anymore, find something similar.
Add value to your customers, do a little bit more for them so they can feel what receives from you exceeds face value of money paid.
Have all of your computers and phones backed-up regularly. I paid a steep price before.
These are what I have learned along my adventure (am still learning)
Again, best of luck to you!
Ohhhh thanks for all your great advice! I'm also in small business so understand how the business education MUST be secondary to the traditional business theories.
I'll look more into SEO and increase our hashtag use. We could definitely benefit from this.
I'll also back up my phone today! Our servers are backed up but I saw the little warning on my phone that it wasn't backed up and I've been ignoring it.
We love our clients, we'll keep on spoiling them!
Thanks again for your comment. I've followed you.