Starting a Business with Familiar Skills
I discuss why new entrepreneurs do not need a breakthrough idea from day one. The conversation explores how building on existing skills, experience and networks can reduce friction whilst leaving room to evolve over time.
Key Takeaways
- Starting with work you already understand can improve your chances of early success
- Entrepreneurship brings enough new challenges without reinventing every part of the business
- A familiar starting point allows founders to learn quickly and evolve the business over time
Topics
- Startup Growth
- Business Strategy
- Entrepreneurship
Transcript
I mean, you tried your hand at corporate life. You worked for PwC, you then moved to an agency. You then left that agency and effectively set up a competitor, carbon copied it. Would you recommend that to any entrepreneur in terms of if they're going to start their journey? Absolutely, yeah. Good question. I think that often when people are just starting, you know, especially if you're younger, like I was 23 then, didn't have a huge amount of experience. I think actually just taking what you've already learned and just doing that for yourself, whether that's a consultancy thing, you don't need to have the home run straight away. In fact, it's quite unlikely that you will because there's so much to learn. So you may as well do something you're already good and competent at, that you might even have a small network of existing clients and other people you've worked with. So you want to keep what you're doing every day as consistent as what you previously were doing, but just now it's for yourself, and you're going to go through a huge learning curve, and then you can always evolve that over time, which is exactly what happened with us. Yeah, absolutely. You don't need the 1% idea straight away, right? Well, you just now every single thing in your life is new. So, you know, is that like if you just do the basic odds of success, you know, you're just creating extra friction. Whereas at least if like only 50% is brand new, like how do I do PAYE? Or like, you know, how do I set up a business bank account? All of these things that suddenly you now have to do. But if the other half is familiar and you already know you're pretty competent at that, I think your chances of success are much higher. And really it's all about kind of learning as quickly as you can. Absolutely.