Want to Start a Business?
Want to start a business?
It’s hard for me to remember a time before I wanted to be a business owner. I knew very early on in my professional journey that I wanted to strike out on my own, build something, and test what I was made of.
I spent 8 years trying to figure out what kind of business I wanted to start before I finally actually did it.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend taking that long yourself, however, I wouldn’t say that was wasted time. Over that period I learned many skills that would be essential for starting and operating my business.
Here is what that 8 year journey taught me.
First, you need to decide what your ultimate goal for your business is.
How big do you want to go?
Is it going to be a multi-billion endeavor?
Or is it going to provide just enough for your ideal lifestyle?
Do you want to build a large team?
Or do you want to do it solo?
Are you going to go all in and start building with all your effort?
Or is this a side business while you are still working?
Questions like these help narrow in on the intended scope of what you are going to build. This will inform which business models that are going to align with your objectives.
To ask this in one question: do you want to have a large enterprise business or a small side hustle business?
I’ve gone back and forth on this over time, but when I finally got started on Off the Beaten Path Financial, I went the side-hustle route. This was for a few reasons, not the least of which was for the long-term of my business I wanted something that could bring in money to support my lifestyle without significant time input on my part.
In this post, we’ll focus more on the small side hustle business since it’s what I have experience in, and a smaller business is what most people are really after.
Now imagine you are sitting on the beach in Bali, sipping a mai tai, and you get a notification on your phone. $500 just landed in your bank account.
Pretty sweet huh!
That’s the dream isn’t it? Mailbox money that shows up regardless of what you are doing at that moment.
Personally, I struggled with coming up with a business idea.
A lot.
I looked at starting a business, buying a business, consulting for businesses, I looked at it all.
In hindsight, what I know now is that probably the easiest place to start is looking at your existing skills and figuring out how to monetize one of them.
There’s a lot of wisdom in starting here. After all, if you are already skilled in the particular area that your business will focus on, you’re already large steps ahead of the game.
So, what are you known for?
What do people come to you with questions on?
What do you spend most of your free time doing?
These are the places to start your business idea search.
If your search turns up empty, what skills do you wish you had?
What kind of things do you like to do?
What can you go out and learn to become an expert in?
Once you have established what you can be an “expert” in, whether you already have the knowledge or you need to develop the skill, now it gets interesting.
The simplest thing to do is to help someone with the skill you identified.
For example, I realized I knew a lot about investing and personal finance. So I started talking to people about that.
That helped me realize that my level of knowledge was much more than most people.
So I went further.
I started to see if people would be willing to pay for what I was teaching or helping them with.
Surprise, surprise they were.
So now I started charging them for this.
Boom, there is your business.
3 Easy Steps:
Determine what you are an expert in
Offer to help people with this thing (for free)
Sell this service
Now, it can obviously become much more complicated than this.
Do I need a website?
Should I make a course?
What about making videos for Tik Tok?
Don’t get overwhelmed.
The first objective is to get someone to pay you for something.
Once you have done this, then you can start to figure out what kind of business you want to build.
Don’t over complicate it.
Find a skill.
Sell the skill.
