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I think that before you even start a business, you need to look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘Am I really a person who could be an entrepreneur?’
Michael Rao Susan Corcoran
try and make this thing work. So you have got to have the willingness to do that. If you think you are going to do this on a 9-to-5 basis, forget it.
CM: When you are a business owner, it
is not just your own life. You have a con- science. You are actually responsible for putting bread on the table of the people who work for you, and that is an added layer
of responsibility many entrepreneurs don’t even really think about, because, until you are in that position, you don’t think about it.
RS: Well, assuming that Harry has clarified his business plan and his niche, now he has to establish the business itself. What’s next? Financing? HR?
RW: If he’s got a business plan, part of that plan is going to show him how much money he needs from a startup point of view and how much money he is going to need on a continuing basis. From that, he can start to say, ‘Well, have I got it? If I haven’t got it, how am I going to raise it?’
CM: Anything that he is going to want
Yes, you need other individuals—whether it is a consultant or another owner or whoever—
who are the right persons to oversee that part of the business because the owner may
not necessarily have the right skills.
Q1 2013
and other things we may want to put in place so we are protecting [ourselves].
RS: It sounds like being ill-prepared is the single biggest pitfall that would-be entrepre- neurs fall into.
JM: Absolutely.
RW: Amen. Also, they frequently have never done what they are now saying they are going to open a business to do. They’ve done something like it, but they have never really been in the industry at a level where they can see what the big picture is.
RW: Sometimes it also means bringing along somebody as a partner who you can work with who’s got the skills that you don’t have...
JM: ...To complement each other.
JG: I think that’s right. There’s a big
chasm you have to cross between starting
a product and starting a business. One of the aspects of that chasm in the tax and accounting area, for example, [is that] many entrepreneurs feel that if they have losses
at the beginning, they don’t need to bother filing. That is a big mistake. Secondly, there
better not to do it because that is really not what he’s got to offer. If you can get the help outside and you can focus on what you and only you can do, you are a lot better off than [if you were] trying to do it all. I want to go back to what Michael Rao was talk- ing about earlier, which is, ‘Who are you as an individual and what can you do?’ One
of the things we try to stress is that, if you are going to run your own business, forget about hours. Now you are going to be work- ing twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day— six, seven days a week at times—in order to
LS: What I had found is that people in Harry’s situation came to me during this crisis with a lot of experience and technical knowledge—like a mechanic who knows how to put a car together and take it apart— but they did not know how to sell their services. Frequently, they try to educate their customer rather than sell the product. They are more a pusher of information than a cre- ator of dialogue.
CM: You can be a creative person, you
can be inventive, you can come up with
an ingenious product. But those are very different from actually being in business— very different. I don’t want to discourage anybody. It is terrific to be in business. It is just that you need to be prepared.
JM: Having that team [that we] mentioned before—whether it is an accountant or an attorney or an advisor—is really paramount to help guide that person to be successful.
is a sales tax that has to be collected, and
if you do not collect it, then you become personally liable for the sales tax. There are many other areas.
SC: So often individuals are misclassified as independent contractors when they should be classified as employees. Once entre- preneurs start utilizing other individuals, they start getting into employment-related concerns. They need to be prepared to inter- view. There are just so many things that you want in place, and yes, you need other individuals—whether it is a consultant or another owner or whoever—who are the right persons to oversee that part of the business because the owner may not neces- sarily have the right skills.
RW: And even if he can do it, it is sometimes
to develop—his product, his marketing, whether he needs an accountant or an attorney—he must be properly capitalized.
MR: The first thing I did, before I even opened my business, was to reach out to ten brokers and owners in different market- places to create mentorship.
LS: And there are a lot of programs where similar entrepreneurs get together and talk.
RW: Start with chambers of commerce that almost every town has. And then there are trade shows. You certainly want to call on as much knowledge as you can find from people who have anything to do with your industry, because nobody can know it all.
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