Starting one’s own business is always an invigorating but somewhat anxiety provoking experience. You are about to leave the comfort zone of college, your home, a big corporation or even a non-profit or any other type of salaried employment. In exchange you have independence and the chance to pursue your dream. The flip side is you no longer have large resources –money, manpower, credit, expertise, contacts, name recognition– all you have is …. you. You also have the rent or the telephone, the travel , marketing , research , direct mail and whatever else to pay for. If you have a payroll or even someone to come in and water the plants every two weeks, that’s your responsibility, too. No wonder it’s an anxiety provoking experience.

The thought that keeps most entrepreneurs motivated at those first insecure moments is the firm knowledge that great risk can reap great rewards.

How do you get started?

I was reading this advice by Mark Cuban, Owner of Dallas Mavericks, entrepreneur with a $2.5 billion net worth who made his fortune  starting Audionet with a partner in 1995, combining their mutual interest in college basketball and webcasting. Audionet launched with a single server and ISDN line, went on to become Broadcast.com and, in 1999, during the Dot-com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.9 billion in Yahoo! stock. ( Parenthetically, Mark was booted off “Dancing with the Stars” in almost no time flat, proving that being a billionaire does not give you smooth co-ordination, much less allow you to glide across the dance floor like Fred Astaire.)

Mark’s blog is blog maverick.  He wrote a blog about How to Get Rich which starts out advising us to be  obsessive about saving our money.  He goes on to say:

“The 2nd rule for getting rich is getting smart. Investing your time in yourself and becoming knowledgeable about the business of something you really love to do

It doesn’t matter what it is. Whatever your hobbies, interests, passions are. Find the one you love the best and GET A JOB in the business that supports it.

It could be as a clerk, a salesperson, whatever you can find. You have to start learning the business somewhere.  Instead of paying to go to school somewhere, you are getting paid to learn.  It may not be the perfect job, but there is no perfect path to getting rich.

Before or after work and on weekends, every single day, read everything there is to read about the business. Go to trade shows, read the trade magazines, spend a lot of time talking to the people you do business with about their business and the people they buy from.

This is not a short term project. We aren’t talking days. We aren’t talking months. We are talking years. Lots of years and maybe decades. I didn’t say this was a get rich quick scheme. This is a get rich path.”

Cuban goes on to talk about times of uncertainty in business, that there will always be booms and busts and one has to take advantage of them: “Booms are when the smart people sell. Busts are when rich people started on their path to wealth.”

That, of course, is easier said than done since no one really knows when there will be a boom or, more ominously, a bust.  One has to wonder if, when Cuban sold to Yahoo he knew he was in the middle of the boom.

AdvancingWomen.com believes, whether boom or bust, in order to have staying power, one needs to operate their business on lean, mean principles so you can ride out the busts and be ready for the boom times, whether you choose to sell or not:

Watch Your Pennies; They’re Coming Out of Your Pocket Now

Starting your own business, whether home-based, in a loft , strip mall , business incubator, or at a seriously impressive office space, requires some serious thinking about whether you are ready to accept certain realities. Very probably, if you are leaving a large well- financed corporation , organization, university or government agency, you are going to have to work harder and make do with less.

For some, it is a wrenching adjustment to scale down and have to balance decisions about spending money to save time, or working longer hours to save cash and increase cash flow. Necessities, like receptionists and clerks in large offices become luxuries in small offices. If you can do it yourself , it costs nothing. Yes, your time may be worth $100 an hour, but is anyone paying you that between 8 pm and midnight.?

As humbling at it may be, you may realize, not only can you not afford to have someone else water and fertilize the plants in your office, you can’t even afford the plants. The good news is that professional business analysts like Peter Lynch who ran the Magellen Fund and studied thousands of businesses, didn’t like seeing a ficus in an office…. or a mahogany desk, or good art or fine china. Lynch only felt good about start up companies on the second floors of strip centers with metal desks and linoleum flooring… or something comparable… because that made a statement the people running the company were serious about making and saving money. So, often, Lynch invested Magellan’s money in their company’s stocks and that cash infusion got them roaring. If you watch your pennies and forego the ficus and the palms, this could happen to you.

One always has to make tough choices to cut costs. Here are some suggestions from experienced start up entrepreneurs:

• Keep overhead costs to a minimum. Rent a modest office. Or work out of your home. Many entrepreneurs today keep costs low with “virtual offices” and outsourced workers across the city or the globe.
• Keep your desks and equipment functional not “showy”. ( The impression you make with showy equipment might not be what you intend… too much money spent on decor spells “inexperience” to the battle scarred.)
• Buy second hand. Do you think any good antique dealers either buy retail or shop at Office City? That’s not where the bargains are or the best looking furniture either.
• Forget support staff…. call don’t write… use your email…avoid paper. If you are really cheap, or don’t have $100 bucks for a copier/scanner, you can email it over to Fedex-Kinko’s every evening and pick it up in the morning.
• Answer your own phone and dispense with calls in a few minutes… or spend $30 have a “virtual receptionist” like One Box, routing your calls to any phone number or associate, forwarding email, voice mail, fax notifications to your inbox where you can handle them at your leisure.
• Work until seven and eat a little later. You can do all your “support” chores after regular office hours. Tell people you were raised in Europe or Latin America and are accustomed to later evening hours.
• Don’t skimp on a professional logo, business cards or letterhead stationary. They are part of your direct dealing with the public and come under the category of marketing, which should always be first rate. But with today’s software programs you should be able to stick to simple design, with a professional logo and just send it out to be printed.
• And don’t forget to market. No matter how small or how thrifty you are, you can’t afford not to have a budget for this. Just be sure you make the effort to learn what really works and is effective in your field before you actually spend money marketing. You have to make every dollar and every penny count. The journey to success is long and full of unexpected pot holes… you never want to run out of cash along the way.
• Remember how and where you do your work isn’t as important as what you do. If working in your small business is giving you the opportunity to do interesting and useful work, that’s more important and more gratifying than having either a ficus or a $5,000 copier.

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