Doers and Talkers

I was talking to a friend the other day. He was asking me how my business was going. I told him how things were going. He then told me of the plans he had to start selling on eBay and then get a website built to open a full e-commerce site. I’d heard the story before. He first told me it two years ago. He was going to put some money aside and buy some stock before starting in business on eBay. He’ll still be telling me these plans in another year. And plans are all they will ever be because he lacks the motivation and confidence to act.

He’s not unusual. He falls into the category of people who dream but never take any action to make the dream a reality. They talk a good game but never actually commit to playing one. They’re always waiting to find the perfect product, or waiting until the time is right before they begin.

Well they’ll be waiting forever. There’s no perfect product and the time is never right. Deep down they know this. This is just an excuse to prevent them from taking action and committing themselves to a course of action. They are afraid. Afraid of what might happen, afraid to step into the arena and test themselves.

The people who succeed are action takers. They don’t wait for the perfect moment because they realise that it will never come. They know they’ll never find the perfect product at the perfect price. So they act with what they have.

They step into the arena armed with the knowledge they posses and see what happens. When they start to get real live feedback from the market, they adjust their plan. They realign themselves, regroup and move forward again. Constantly monitoring the feedback coming in from the market place.

If something fails they don’t drop their head pack up and complain to everyone who will listen that you can’t make any money on eBay or online. They analyse their results, take logical decisions under pressure and try another angle.

When I started my business on eBay, I bought products, which were very slow sellers. A hard core of my products sold frequently every week others hardly ever rang up a sale. I just adjusted my strategy. When the slow sellers had gone, I stopped selling them. I don’t want to tie money up for months in a product that’s hard to move when I could invest it in something that sells every week and give me a return on my investment fast so I could reinvest and build up wealth.

So I looked around for other products to replace the slow selling ones. You have to show courage and take some risks. You don’t know what products will sell. You can do some market research on eBay to see what’s selling but there’s no getting away from it, you will have to take a risk and invest some capital in a product that might not sell.

This is the fun of running a business. Where you are competing and making decisions that will affect your future growth. I’ve recently invested some capital in another product range. I don’t know if it will sell well, or even if it will sell at all. I’ve done some research and committed myself to a course of action that I will pursue with white-hot determination. I want to grow my business so I have to move on. I have to leave my comfort zone and move forward. I’m prepared to do this.

You can narrow the risk by just buying a few different products in the same line, putting them up for sale and seeing what happens. The point is you have to act. My friend will never take that final step. Things will never be right. They will always be “too many at it”. What he means is, he’d like to do it but he doesn’t have the courage to take the action required.

Taking Action

As I look back over the year at how far I’ve progressed with my business it strikes me that I’ve reached this point now because of a single reason. That reason is taking action. Ignoring most of the advice given by government agencies and banks about meticulously planning every move you make. Advice about researching your market and laying out a business plan, a marketing plan, a buying plan and any other plan you can think of.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not devaluing the importance of planning and research but I do think that we can get bogged down in planning. I mean what is the point of producing a three-year forecast profits spreadsheet based on guesswork. If you haven’t started your business you can’t predict profit potential. You need some hard data to work with.

When I first decided to start a business I read all the usual blurbs and instructions on the business sites and provided by the banks, and to be honest there was so much information I was starting to get depressed. It looked like you couldn’t start a business unless you had an MBA in business studies.

I wasted too much time trying to create some fancy business plan to please who? Why was I listening to advice from the banks about business plans, I mean if you were taking business advice would you want to listen to organizations which have bankrupt themselves and taken the country with them. Who are the banks to offer advice. I think they are now completely discredited.

Eventually I asked myself why I was labouring over a business plan that meant nothing to me. I wasn’t after any money from the banks so what was I doing wasting my time following their instructions? And wasting my time was exactly what I was doing.

What’s the point of spending months writing some fancy plan that no one was going to see. I finally woke up and ditched the business plan and the marketing plan. My plan was simple; I wanted to set up an extra income stream. I wanted to do this by starting a business part-time. I didn’t need to write that down. I didn’t need to make pointless profit projections. I needed to take action and just do it.

So I jumped in. I bought some stock and started selling it. I invested in a website, I established relationships with suppliers and I was in business. As I got feedback from the marketplace I made adjustments to my business based on hard feedback. Things happened which I could never have expected and I came up with solutions then moved on.

Before I knew it I was in business, solving problems daily. Coming up with new strategies. Buying new stock and up to my eyes in everyday business activity. I learned more in a month of being in the marketplace than I would have by reading all the tons of books out there about how to start a business.

So if you’re thinking of starting your own business. Forget about reading all the opinions from people who have probably never run a business and just dive straight into it. Take action! Taking action is the most important thing. You can deliberate forever, plan for perfection that you’ll never achieve or just jump in. I recommend the jumping in. Once you commit yourself you will start receiving hard data back from the marketplace, from these facts you can base future decisions.