Taking Action

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.