7 Tips for Starting Your Own Business While in College
This is one of the most entrepreneurial generations in history. Some chose to start their own businesses for lifestyle reasons and some were forced into it because they were unable to find an organization willing and able to hire them. But all new businesspeople need help and as someone who started his business while in college, I feel well qualified to pass along some tips that I don't see in many of these lists:
- Look beyond the business ideas which you see every day. Rather than starting a restaurant, retail store, or advertising supported web business, look for ideas which are business-to-business oriented as the competition tends to less and the financial rewards higher.
- Don't spend any money which is unlikely to generate a substantial profit within six months. Don't buy new desks, computers, phones, or other overhead. If a $25 garage sale desk will suffice, go with that rather than the $1,000 nice, new desk in the office supply store. The reason? You'll need that $975 in order to eat because it is an almost certainty that your business will not be as successful as soon as you believe it will.
- Don't over estimate the value of being first to market. One of the greatest myths of business is the first mover advantage. There is actually more of an advantage to being second or third as you can learn from the mistakes of the first movers and you don't have to spend as much time or money educating the market or even building a market.
- Don't bring in partners if you can instead hire the same talent as an employee. If you want to bring in a friend because it will make you feel safer, get a dog.
- If you do enter into a partnership, be sure that each of you bring different strengths to the business and that you have a signed partnership agreement negotiated with the assistance of your own attorneys. No partnership lasts forever and your relationship at the beginning will be better than at the end so if you're going to have a disagreement, better to have it now than later for you surely will have it later.
- Have an exit strategy. Is your goal to run the business until you retire and then close the doors without selling it? Fine, but that's pretty unlikely. Think through whether you want to sell the business and, if so, when and why.
- Don't create a business with the goal of selling it a specific organization. That is just about guaranteed to drive your decisions in ways that make no financial sense unless that organizations buys your business and that almost never happens.
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