Are you thinking of starting a business?
Great, we know that it wasn't an easy decision to make as you may be exchanging your ‘comfortable' salaried job for a potentially uncertain income.
The next question is : Have you done your homework?
Are you sure that the business you intend opening has a high probability of succeeding? Are you using the best possible suppliers? Is the business in the right area? Will your prices be competitive? Why will customers buy your product instead of your competitors?
Do you Need a Business Plan?
A business plan is a document you set up before you start your business. It contains many items like your marketing strategy, your estimated cash flow, estimated expenses, break even analysis, analysis of competitors, proposed suppliers list, previous experience in the field, etc. There are many sites you can visit to learn more about setting up a business plan. Go to Google.com and search for "setting up a business plan". The business plan shows the bank that you have done your homework and are as prepared as possible.
Now I am going to throw a bone in the fan : I have never set up a formal business plan for any of my own businesses in my life and if I can help it, never will. It is not that I can't, or haven't for others, I just feel that if you are able to fund yourself, then setting up an elaborate business plan as required by a bank is a waste of valuable time.
I agree fully that you cannot start a business over a couple of beers on a Saturday afternoon, that is fateful !!!
You can however start a business with way less planning than a formal business plan requires. No amount of planning or book reading is going to fully prepare you to run a business. Most of your learning is done on the job, the hard and expensive way. Also sometimes one can get bogged down in all the planning that by the time the planning is done you may think that the business is just not viable.
Whereas if you do a reasonable amount of planning and then jump in and just do it, you often succeed where it wasn't thought possible. Take the Wright brothers as an example. At the time it was thought to be impossible to fly, they said we will put all our efforts into it and we WILL fly. They also realized that the potential payout at the end would be huge. And after a hell of a lot of hard work and cash, they did fly!
We have a similar exampleof how we got into the printing industry. It boils down to us climbing into a very competitive field where it requires hundreds of thousands of Rands to get into, and we did it totally differently without a cent and made a success of it.
The bottom line is - sometimes you just need to get off your butt and do it.
