If I knew then what I know now

One of the big problems with starting a business is that you don’t know what you don’t know – if only you could go ask your future, highly successful self for some start-up advice.

Well, we don’t have a time machine here at SmartCompany, but we do have a team of brilliant entrepreneurs and experts who have agreed to share their best “if I knew then what I know now” start up tip.

If you’re a successful entrepreneur and you’ve got a start up tip to share with the SmartCompany community, we’d love to hear it – just post it in the comments at the bottom of this article.

Passion in, emotion out

Make sure that your product/service has a real point of difference that your potential customer will pay for.

Have a marketing plan that connects with your target market and remember to keep your passions in but your emotions out of the start up decision.
Marcia Griffin

Hire people who are smarter than you

The best advice I was ever given was to surround yourself with people who are better than you at their area of expertise. It was rather eloquently phrased as something like: “A class managers hire A class people, while B class managers hire C class people that will never outclass them, but will also never dramatically help improve the organisation.”
Kirsty Dunphy

Be a part-time entrepreneur

Don’t give up your day job. Start-up ventures take a long time to gain traction and always much longer than you anticipate. Until such time as the business has momentum, you are best to keep one foot in a paying job to cover your weekly expenses. Once you are confident the business will pay its way – go for it.
Tom McKaskill

Don’t forget the obvious

I spend a lot of time going into businesses and I see two kinds. Small businesses that never grow and create jobs for the owners and ones that grow. My interest is in the growth companies. If your business is to grow get some really good advice on the stages it should pass through and what will be required at each stage – don’t guess or assume.

Find a mentor who does not want a lot of money for advice. This usually involves being really brave and asking for help from someone you respect enormously. And don’t be afraid to ask lots of people really hard questions about what you need to know.

All businesses require systems to scale up, so plan ahead for the costs of building those systems. It will take time, money, concentration, intelligence, good advisors and a lot of hard work. Of course I have to throw in make great use of stable IT technology to work efficiently, whatever that means for your business.

Remember business is a game, some days you win and some days you lose. Make sure there are more days where you win than days where you lose and remember to have fun and celebrate the successes you have.

And finally, if I have to boil business down to one simple rule for me it is: Do the obvious things. So many people know what they should be doing and spend all their efforts somewhere else – like not doing the BAS statements.
David Markus

Be the expert

Clients want to have an expert on their side – so decide you will become the leading expert in your field.

What would it look like? What would you have to do? What would your premises look like? How would you dress?

When I learnt about this concept, I decided I wanted to be known as “the leading expert in wealth creation through property”. So I had to decide what would it look like, what would my offices look like, how many books would I have published, what radio programs would my commentaries be on? Then I set about doing what I needed to do and being what I needed to be and behaving like I needed to behave as if I was that leading expert. And over the years I became the preeminent expert in my field.

What can you become an expert at? Don’t worry if someone is already in that space – you can claim it!
Michael Yardney

Find the right partner

Every successful venture is second cousin to a family of failed efforts. Too many start ups have given up before their venture has moved from a glimmer to a gleam in the eye of external investors. Just take the case of Jodie Rich and his mates Lachlan Murdoch and James Packer. The hot tip out of all this is to find partners who share your enthusiasm in both the good and bad times and not just look for another rich family to tide you over into enviable success.
Colin Benjamin