Especially if your business idea doesn’t fit neatly into a box, there will be lots of people who initially won’t understand what it is you’re trying to do.
For me, everything started with a small and vague idea attached to a big bundle of feelings. I knew what I wanted my company to feel like, what kind of workplace I wanted to create, and what kind of relationship I wanted to foster with my clients. But I was far away from being able to articulate that clearly.
Inside I felt intense exhilaration about what I was going to create, but I was often met with blank stares and irritating questions whenever I tried to convey the news that I was starting my own business to my friends and family. The fact that certain people will not be sharing your initial excitement, or won’t react the way you’d like them to, especially in this very vulnerable first phase of figuring things out, can be disheartening. But it often has nothing to do with the quality of your idea–it just means that you haven’t figured out how to properly communicate it yet. “I’m going to start a creative agency-production company-hybrid that focuses on small and medium sized businesses” weirdly wasn’t able to stir as much excitement in others as it did within me. Especially if people aren’t very familiar with your industry, their initial reactions can be frustrating. Trust in your idea, keep on working, and once you have something more concrete to show them, they will start sharing your enthusiasm.
Working in a vacuum is usually not a good idea. You’ll get stuck here and there along the way and will need a fresh pair of eyes on your situation to help you move forward. Other times there’ll be a breakthrough that feels meaningful to you and you want to share that with people. Choosing the right people to talk to or to ask for feedback can make all the difference. If you’d like a second opinion on the company logo, don’t ask the friend that you like the most, ask the friend who has a relevant design background. The retired insurance broker in your family can be of infinite value when it comes to helping you determine the types of coverage you’ll need, but don’t ask them to give you notes on the “About” page of your website (unless they also fit your target demographic). Especially in the early phases before launch, stick with the pros, or at least with people who have an understanding of the field. If asked, anyone will happily give you their assessment on anything. But if it’s outside of their field you’ll just be dealing with their personal opinions and preferences which might do more harm than good, especially when your goal is to make decisions based on the advice you get.
Starting a business on your own is hard, extremely scary, and incredibly complex. Money, time and expertise are the three main resources that you’ll have to learn to balance. Most of us are working with limited resources, so we have to be strategic about how we use them. A good way to do this is to map out all the steps that need to be accomplished in order to launch your business. In a second step, you’ll decide if those items will have a high or low impact on your business. Then you’ll take a look at what your areas of expertise are, how much money you have to invest in the launch of your business, and how much time you are realistically able to spend. This leaves you with three options for each task:
1. You can do this, because it clearly falls within your area of expertise.
2. You are willing to learn how to do this because it’s related to your area of expertise, and/or it doesn’t take much time to master.
3. You will need help from a professional.
Low impact tasks that fall within option 1 or 2 (like registering your web domain) you should definitely take on yourself if your goal is to save money. Take the web domain example. I doubt it will have much of an impact on your business which service you pick to secure your domain. Additionally pretty much every domain service is going tomake it an incredibly quick and easy process. On the other hand, for high impact tasks, even if they might theoretically fall within 1 or 2, it’s always worth considering hiring the right professional. For example, having worked as a motion graphics artist, I have quite a lot of design experience. I’m sure I would have been able to come up with a logo and visual identity for my company that wouldn’t have been too visually offensive. However, knowing about the incredible powers of good (and bad) design, and being aware that visual appeal was the most important aspect of the world in which OF—KIN would operate, branding was among the highest impact items on my list so I gladly hired a seasoned professional.
In the end it will always come down to your individual situation. If you need to save money but have a lot of time, you can tackle most of what needs to be done yourself. If you’re not worried about spending money you can choose to outsource as much as possible and only concentrate on the few things that are most important to you or that you know you are good at. If you have neither a lot of money or a lot of time, then you’ll have to be even more patient. Break your steps up into smaller steps. As long as you keep moving forward, you’ll get there.
For OF-KIN it took a year of constant development from the initial idea to the official launch. And for most of that time I kept thinking that we were only a mere month or two away from being open for business. Especially if your new idea doesn't follow a clear cut traditional business model, there is a lot of time consuming discovery involved in getting your business up and running. You need to give yourself that time. If a decision you made the previous week doesn’t feel right, don’t settle. Eight months in you might realize, that what you thought were your most important core values in month one, aren’t all that relevant anymore. So you adapt. It is perfectly normal for your initial idea to evolve and change as you start looking at and scrutinizing it from a real world perspective.
A good foundation is incredibly important, and we strongly recommend investing in a Brand Development session with us during that phase.
Somewhere between rushing it (bad) and endless procrastination in the name of perfectionism (also bad) sits that sweet spot where you know that whatever part of your business you were working on is as good as it can be at that point in time. It’s incredibly tempting to keep trying to finesse something to perfection, but that perfection will often never materialize. You don’t want to lose yourself trying to make one aspect marginally better while there are a million other more important things that need your attention. Knowing that your business and strategy will evolve over time up until and long after your launch, it might be a good idea to get as much as possible just loosely in place, to get the whole picture before diving back in and finessing certain aspects.
Starting this endeavor as a purpose driven solopreneur, I was definitely seeing the company that I was trying to build as an extension of myself. The reason I decided to build my own company was that I was disillusioned and fed up with the industry I had been working in for over 12 years. The goal with OF-KIN was very much to create the company of my dreams, which, however admirable that thought may be, unfortunately dissolved all possible boundaries between me and the company. Whatever happened to the company felt like it was happening to me personally.
Well-meaning inquiries from friends and family members about how my company was doing felt like personal attacks, because my company wasn’t “doing” at all–it didn’t officially exist yet, and I was under immense pressure knowing I had nothing to show the outside world yet. I was tying my worth as a person to the worth of a company, and since there was no official company yet, I had no worth in this world. Of course I’d known for a long time that this thinking was plain wrong and unhealthy, but I had no idea how to shake it.
A few months ago I was about to attend an event where I knew I had to introduce myself to a lot of strangers, but what would I say? “I own a creative production company” was what I came up with and this simple phrase caused a colossal shift in my thinking. For the first time I was able to see my company as this thing, separate from myself, that, yes, I had to take care of because I was the owner of it, but that was in no way connected to Lisa Schatz, the private person. I finally was able to internalize that all those bumps in the road had nothing to do with me personally–they were just little nuisances I had to take care of on behalf of the company.
Emotionally distancing yourself from your company is one of the most important and most powerful acts of self care you can perform as an entrepreneur.
Here is what I learned while waiting over 8 months for an important business document from the New York State Department of State: if there’s an option to pay extra for expedited processing, DO IT.
