Lessons from an entrepreneur 2 years in from leaving the corporate safety blanket for their own consultancy practice (original article link):
1) Don’t choose a stupid name for the company – pick one that people can spell and won’t put people off visiting the site. Sorry, Aardvark does not count 🙂 – but I do think Apple is on to a winner there :).
2) Don’t waste time on manual processes, use technology to automate tasks as appropriate. It would be interesting and useful to list what are the common tasks that can be easily automated. Perhaps start with directly revenue chasing ones e.g. I wrote a system to automatically print off payment reminders for late accounts for a user once.
3) Get out there and figure out how to attract clients and create a client pipeline. Getting early customers is key as it helps you refine your processes, get money in etc. Of course, you need to really ‘love’ your early customers to get the maximum learning out of them and optimize the path to getting future customers. I wonder if there is an opportunity for a light-weight CRM / prospect tracking software package.
4) Figure out / learn how to conduct a sales call – or you will lose clients. Not my area but perhaps there are some good books on this – any comments/pointers? Of course, you could hire someone who gets sales – perhaps an opportunity for an ‘early stage’ sales outsourcing facility?
5) Get support from someone who has trodden the path you are on – i.e. an argument for good mentoring.
6) Get hooked up with a network of people doing similar things to get good advice and ideas. I suspect this may involve getting on LinkedIn and Facebook groups related to what you want to do, find the major blogs and industry websites of relevance.
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