Tag: Business Start Up

Tips for Business Start Ups: Try not to reinvent the wheel.

Tina and Toni  came to see me today, bubbling over with effervescent excitement. They could hardly contain themselves with their business proposition which they assured me had been focused grouped, road tested, demolished, rethought, redesigned and reconstructed to death.

They tentatively placed a large black box on the table and swore me to secrecy. This idea – this product – this concept – was going to blow my mind, and along with everyone else who had benefitted from it, I would be converted instantly from curious sceptic to sun worshipping zealot, such was the paradigm destroying nature of what I was about to receive, once they had opened the box.

I held my breath as they gingerly levered open the lid and ceremoniously lifted up on high the contents of the matt black box.

“It’s a wheel.” I said.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Whispered Toni.

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Tina asked urgently.

“Yes. It’s a bicycle wheel. It goes around and around, around and around…” They interrupted me before I could get into full song.

“But don’t you see it’s potential?” Toni looked shocked. “You could put it on a large container and attach a couple of donkeys and before you know it you’re moving heavy loads unimaginable distances.”

“With a bit of effort, you could transport many people, many thousands of miles at all times of day.” Tina was incredulous that I wasn’t impressed.

“It’s a wheel. You’re trying to reinvent the wheel. It’s already been done – very successfully, over thousands of years.”

“But it’s not just a wheel!” They chimed in unison. “It’s a neo-wheel which goes forward…” And here was the killer line… “And backwards.”

“At the same time?” I asked. They looked at me with something resembling pity which soon turned to contempt.

“You don’t get it, do you?” Toni hissed.

“Call yourself an advisor?” sneered Tina. “You know the story about Decca and the Beatles don’t you?”

I hung my head in shame – this is every business advisor’s worse nightmare – taking the role of Decca and sending their prospective golden geese off to Parlaphone. 

I capitulated. “It’s a very interesting proposition” I said weakly. “I can see its potential, now you come to mention it. I guess it’s always difficult to see genius in the room when it looks like a bicycle wheel.” 

They warmed to me by now and smiled back. We were going to get on fine, them with their neo-wheel and me with my sense of professional foresightedness still intact. 

Watch this space – the invention of the last 3000 years will be in a street near you soon. And I was there to help make it happen.

The Business Allotment: Tips for Business Start Ups, Lessons for Life.

The Business Allotment: Tips for Business Start Ups, Lessons for Life.

Tips and Tricks for Business Start Ups in Eight Chapters:

  1. Business Start Ups and Life
  2. First, find your Space Centre
  3. If you wanna get ahead, get an algorithm
  4. Don’t flounder in the Founder Syndrome
  5. Find your Inner Mountaineer
  6. Life’s a pitch and then you die
  7. If in doubt say ‘Creative’
  8. How to love your Business Plan

Paperback, 87 pages with accompanying photos.

£9.99
Shop now

Tips for Business Start Ups, Lessons for Life: Yes You May.

Sharon is in the throes of starting up her new business idea of selling coals to Newcastle. On one level it looks a fairly dubious proposition; the coal industry in Newcastle is heaving (or so we are led to believe ); the last thing Newcastle needs is any more aspiring coal importers and in any case the railways aren’t what they were so trying to get the black stuff into the city is more difficult than ever before.

However, Sharon is blessed with a supply of high grade magical coal which does what no other coal has ever done before; she has access to the key Tyneside decision makers and she can guarantee that her first import will put a smile on her bank managers face (well, assuming those faceless automatons have faces any longer).

What Sharon is struggling with is permission. She’s looking for permission to set up the business and looking for an outside agency to say “yes, you may.” – as opposed to the more ambivalent, “yes, you can”.

“Can I really book that freight car?”
“Yes, you may.”
“Can I really contract a volunteer to work with me? Is that legal?’
“Yes it is and yes you may.”
“Can I really put my own logo on our website?”
“Yes you may, and yes you should and yes yes yes.”

Such is the conversation. Many business start ups, like students in their final year at uni; or kids at the edge of the swimming pool who are about to make their first dive into the deep end; or anyone who is about to make the biggest decision of their life; are looking for just one thing: permission. For some-one to say “Yes. It’s not illegal. Yes. It’s a good idea. Yes. It will be hard work. Yes. You might sink but on the other hand you might just swim. Yes. Your coals are just the sort of coals people in Newcastle are looking for. Do it. And do it now.”

“May I? Really?”
“Yes, you may.”

More Tips for Business Start Ups, Lessons for Life here!

Tips for Business Start Ups: the first signs of Spring

“I quit my job this week.”

Joey has been struggling with the transition from regular paid employment into devoting himself to his rickshaw business for some months now. He’s faced the common but still scary challenge of stepping out of the so called comfort zone of his regular pay check, the status in his friends eyes and the increasingly apprehensive look in his children’s eyes when he’s stepped out of the door every morning and left for ‘work’: their look gives away their concern that every time he comes back later that night, his nerves are a little more frazzled, his temper a tiny bit more frayed and his breath laden with a touch more whiskey than it was the night before. 

The safe space of the regular job has become increasingly hostile recently: it’s now an uncertain and distrustful environment with colleagues looking over their shoulders and minding their backs in an attempt to avoid the next round of cuts and restructuring. Joey has never seen so many people sidle around the company corridors like crabs with their backs to the walls, attempting vainly to stop someone else knifing them between their shoulders as they go about their increasingly futile daily grind.

Today contained an epiphanic moment for Joey. A phone call from an eco-friendly transport company in Glasgow placed an order for 50 rickshaws which had to be delivered by Christmas. The task is immense: but it’s given him the security to step out of the unsafe safe space of full time work into the safe insecurity of finally being able to dedicate himself to truly looking after himself and his children. He has no idea what will happen after Christmas – but the first signs of Spring have come six months early for Joey.

“I quit my job this week…” has never sounded so optimistic and his six children can breathe easier knowing their dad will finally be sobering up before he bids them goodnight when he gets home from his real work: running his own business.

More Tips for Business Start Ups, Lessons for Life here!

Tips for Business Start Ups: every question asks for a story.

You’re planning to start up a new business in the New Year and as much as you’d like to be able to start selling straight away and drawing down the king of all business start up requisites – cash – the reality is that cash isn’t going to start flowing out of that tap for some months to come.  

Not only do you need some liquidity in your system (it’s Christmas after all and there’s all those office parties to go to and dance around like you’re the next David Brent from The Office), but you’ve spotted an ideal scheme which is offering countless thousands of pounds of grant to enhance your business growth prospects.  The deadline is 22 December – so what do you do?  You give it your best shot, even though you may never have filled in this kind of application form before.

Before long, you’ll find yourself sweating over the criteria, the funding guidelines and the translation of what the funder wants, what you want and whether or not the two sets of desires are mutually compatible.  If they’re not compatible, then now is the time to consign the application to the WPB and get out to your Christmas networking activities, safe in the knowledge you haven’t just wasted a precious week of your business time on something that was going nowhere quickly.

However, if you sense that that money in the funding pot has your name written all over it, then the first thing you’ll be faced with is the application questions.

The ones which ask you to identify yourself should be pretty straightforward if you’ve got this far in life.  Name, address, email, phone number – if you don’t know these by now (especially your name) then it’s time to pack up the business idea immediately and join your colleagues on the networking dance floor (all assuming you know who they are of course).

The questions which follow tend to be more open ended and ask you to do some original thinking.  No Chat GPT, no original cut and pasting from Wikipedia, previous applications or last week’s shopping list, but some honest to goodness new thinking straight out of your brain which will need to be expressed in a written form.  

Yes, I know it’s difficult, and yes, I know it discriminates against people who would prefer to express their application in the form of expressive dance, but the sad fact is that these questions need answers and they need them to be communicated in a way that the person reading the form will be able to understand.  So, writing it is, writing it has to be and preferably in a language that the form is written in.

Once you’re into form filling mode and are getting the hang of having to answer questions, a useful approach is to use the questions to tell the story you want to tell about your business or project.  Not an act of fiction, or  a work or art necessarily, but an account  which describes your intention with clarity, purpose and urgency.  

Sometimes people use bullet points to present the urgency in their story and this is understandable if you working to a word limit.  But have you ever read a compelling short story composed of bullet points?  I suspect not and the same principle holds for writing application forms for cash.  A good story will seduce, fascinate and wow your readers.  Bullet points merely make readers they’re being fired at.

So, when faced with those questions, face up to them, figure out the story they want to hear and make sure you tell it in a form which most people could follow.  You don’t have to be Quentin Tarantino when it comes to the stories needed to help the growth of your business: although it might help of course if you want to sell  a slate of post modern classic films (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) and your name happens to be Quentin Tarantino.

More Tips for Business Start Ups, Lessons for Life here!

Out now on iBooks! The ideal Christmas present for the aspiring entrepreneur in your life!

Starting a business is much like working an allotment. You have a seed of an idea; you nurture it in a little clay pot until it struggles into the daylight; you stress about providing it with enough manure in the form of funding so that you can eventually transplant it into the wicked, wider world of the adult vegetable patch with all its attendant predators, parasites and pitfalls. With any luck your seed of an idea makes the journey from an innocuous looking seed into a strapping begonia which flowers annually with the minimum attention from you, allowing you to tend to other seeds or sit back and bask in the glory of your potato crop.

Often though, that process of business incubation is all too fraught and too many seeds of business ideas fall on the rough ground of customer disinterest or are devoured by the foxes of enterprises which are faster and more cunning than you when it comes to protecting the febrile business that is struggling into the daylight.

This book introduces various tips and tricks which are designed to help you start and protect that business of yours. It’s an allotment because your business – anyone’s business – cannot survive alone but needs other businesses of different shapes, types and flavours to flourish. An allotment allows for cross trading, cross fertilisation, mutual collaboration and the sharing of ideas in ways which might sound misplaced in the context of a cut and thrust, capitalist market place: but one thing all entrepreneurs know deep down is that they can’t do what they do alone.

They need the input of others, whether this be in the form of shovelling up the shite, digging protective trenches against the voracious slug or simply holding an umbrella over you as the sun burns down on your life long desires. They need manure – obviously – but also need a collection of sharp and blunt tools, good quality soil, an
absence of wasps nests and a good supply of that magical ingredient, water. So simple, so obvious and yet so mysterious – water is to the allotment what vision is to the business.

There’s no guarantee these tips and tricks will work; but if at the very least you can see your business start up as your very own allotment – and not your own private back garden – there is every chance your business will make it through the winter and be around next summer for you to sit in and admire your burgeoning brassicas.

Of course, starting up your business is also very much like trying to steer your life, irrespective of whether you’re in business or not. So, I hope this book helps you navigate your life as much as they are intended to help you tend your beautiful business idea.


Happy Allotmenteering!