It reads better that way, but the truth is, it all happened in reverse.
I was an entrepreneur first and foremost; I ended up pioneering (and have a few arrows in my back to prove it) and then wrote about it. I also consult.
I became an entrepreneur because I was an inventive, or you might say creative, electronics engineer. My only real job was as an apprentice at a missile guidance establishment. It was kind of fun, and I got to visit some real-life battleships.
However, it did not take me long to realize I wanted to work in less destructive, more creative areas, and the short story is that I switched to consumer electronics, created my first commercial keyboard product, and then ran my very first business in all the wrong ways.
I did all the things I thought you should do as a business owner, not what was essential to do for the well-being of the business. I can say that now, as it is long gone. Sure, I can give you excuses, but after three years, the business started to wind down, and I started to realize I might be left with a whole bunch of liabilities.
Over the next year, I unwound all I could, massively reduced my costs, and was lucky enough to walk away free from debt. It was a close shave. The best advice I could get from most people as I described my predicament was that I was young enough to recover. I figured I would rather not have anything to recover from, and by the end, that was where I was, and I was able to go back to contracting for a living for a while to nurse my wounds, pick up some more cash, and think about what next.
I was contracting for about four or five years before meeting my wife and then setting up the business again, this time as a marketing services provider. Here again, I made a different set of mistakes. The biggest of which was signing a five-year lease. Perhaps needless to say, that business lasted five years.
By then, my wife was working in the big city, and I was ready to move on too. By then, I was able to hire a serviced office with month-to-month rent, which was an improvement but not perfect. This remained the case for the next 20 years, and we made millions. Perhaps after a few years, I should have invested in a property and paid rent to myself. Hindsight always provides the perfect view. I did indeed invest in property, so not all was lost.
The experience was wild. Perhaps the toughest foe in all of it was the government and the tax authorities. Nowadays, at least in the UK, contracting is in effect unavailable; this kills R&D. On a more positive note, I was invited to Chair the IAB Search Council (for the UK and Europe) and I was awarded the Best-Seller Quill Award from the National Academy of Best-Selling Authors in Hollywood, which was fun. While at the IAB, we set a number of industry standards, including the specific size of the banner Ad.
So are there problems and solutions? Luckily, there are many, and these are discussed in detail within How To Start A Business Without Any Money. There are a couple of very good reasons you would want to consider starting a business without any money. The first is to totally take risk out of the equation. If you invest nothing, you will not lose anything.
The second reason is that whatever idea you have, the ideas of your potential customers are more important. I cannot tell you how often I have arrived at a client meeting with someone who has said, I know what you do, and what we want is this… Something similar but not the same.
There are third and fourth reasons, and those are time and trouble. It saves a lot of time when you do not need to go around and butter people up in order to persuade them to be interested in what you do and then seek their investment. It also saves a lot of trouble. This kind of trouble is caused when a venture does not work and you have spent all the money. How many friends will you have, then?
In the book, I show many ways you can easily acquire customers’ money. It is great news, as although you do not eliminate the risk, you share the risk with a party, and if successful, there is a very beneficial outcome for them that does not have to involve giving up equity.
So all of this is the tip of the iceberg, and that is why I wrote the book. There you will find more hard-hitting suggestions, and I have gone into detail to describe the very best business models. You will also find a ton of tips, tricks, and insider information. Want to know more? Why not use the Amazon read-inside feature on the Amazon book page here?