Thinking of starting your dream business? Well, I’ve spoken to so many women with dreams of starting their own business. Women who dream it but have never made the leap. So I ask them this question:
What’s stopping you from starting today?
The most common answer I hear is money.
Please note this post may contain affiliate links. Please refer to my disclosure for more information.
Money: The Big Misconception About Starting Your Dream Business
It’s a common misconception that starting a business in today’s competitive economy takes thousands or millions of dollars. After all, you only need to look at the crowdfunding and Kickstarter campaigns online to see the amount of money being channelled into new businesses.
You might even read articles in the business press about Silicon Valley companies with 7 figure startup funds. It sounds insane, frightening, and it probably makes you believe that you’ll never be able to compete, right?
But here’s the truth.
Starting a business doesn’t take millions of dollars. It doesn’t take a team of Ivy League graduates, and it doesn’t take a cash-injection from a top venture capital business. Yes, you can go down this route. You could go big from the start and bring in marketing agencies and red team testing and a big PR campaign if you really wanted to.
But that is simply one option and it’s not the only route to success (in fact, getting outside funding typically means you need to take an incredibly aggressive strategy with your business from day one, and that in itself is very high risk and leads to a lot of high profile failures; it’s this high-risk strategy that allows investors to make their money back from a single investment when the other nine fold).
Starting A Business Without A Big Budget
We have technology now that means that anyone can create their own website, from scratch, without any background in coding and development. WordPress.org – which I run this website on – is probably the best example of this. It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it’s really quick to launch a website on it.
If you want to create a shop, there are places like Etsy and Shopify that make it incredibly easy to just start advertising your first product.
So if you have a business idea you are dreaming of, but worry about the costs, here is what I would suggest:
Take away all the complications and visions about your future business, and just write down the simplest form your business could take. So if you want to create an online shop, think about just one or two things you could start to sell. If you want to create a consultancy, think about advertising a single consultation service. Just keep it simple and make a start. An imperfect but real business is better than a perfect dream that never happens, right?
With a little bit of determination and by setting aside some weekend hours to getting it done, you could have a business website by this time next week. You could be selling your services and products. You could be winning your first customer. Doesn’t that sound exciting? You could be an entrepreneur within a week from now. And if you need extra help, don’t forget to download my free guide (see the box to the right of this blog). It will give you the step-by-step instructions for getting it all done.
What To Read Next
Starting a business in 2018? Here are my predictions about what you’ll need to do to succeed
Build a email list fast on a limited budget with my step by step guide to low cost Facebook ads
