In a matter of months e-magination Infosolutions will celebrate it’s 10th anniversary! Although, we actually registered the website domain in 2002 – making it 15 years old. This means that we toyed with the idea of starting a business for 5 years before actually making it official and registering the business. We can only imagine how different things would have been, or how much further we would be, if we had had those 5 extra years!
The moral of the story is that now is as good a time as any or it may never happen, because procrastination is the indiscriminate thief of your time. Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?>>
Chalkboard drawing – choose from now or later
Stop talking ‘business’ and starting doing ‘business’
People have a tendency to do a lot of talking about ‘business’ ideas or how they want to start a business and yet they either never do anything about it or they wait until it is almost too late. You don’t want your product or business idea to be ‘the next Uber’ or ‘the Facebook of…’, because then you’ve already lost out on a huge opportunity. Sometimes the only thing standing between someone else’s success and yours is that they executed their idea first (or, indeed, at all).
I have offered my mentorship to many businesses starting out and they often get stuck at the very beginning, unsure as to how to start. My advice is always the same: Write down an action plan. Your action plan should include everything from building an MVP (minimum viable product), setting your pricing, doing market surveys, running ads on social media, to hiring people (and the list goes on). Find out how mentorship could help you grow your business>>
However, there are a lot of reasons why people hesitate to start their business, which is why it is important to make sure that you understand all the risks involved and exactly what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Is the life of an entrepreneur for you?>>
Don’t be afraid of failure
Fear is often what holds people back from starting their business, or taking the plunge into entrepreneurship. You will need to understand that every business goes through multiple seasons of missing expectations and targets, but your business can learn and evolve through interpreting these ‘failures’. See your failures as opportunities to better shape your business>>
Our business started just like every other, a small group of people that just expanded. Initially we didn’t have a clear business plan, but we knew we could build a business around offering other businesses a service. 10 years later our ‘idea’ services some of the biggest brands in South Africa, Africa, and Europe. So our advice to you is don’t wait for tomorrow, start your business now.
Do you have an idea and don’t know where to start? Give me a shout on email at richard@emagination.co.za and we will set up some time and I will give you my full attention and give you some pointers on where you can start and how to get it going.
