Best Advice For Future Entrepreneurs: Just Do It.

25 years ago, Wieden+Kennedy, then a small Portland ad agency, penned the famous slogan for Nike – Just Do It. Two years later in 1990, I co-founded my own advertising agency and I have been working as an entrepreneur and with entrepreneurs ever since.

Over the past 23 years, I have learned the best advice I can give future entrepreneurs is to “Just Do It.” Just take that first step to start your new company, to start your new adventure. Along the way, I have learned the world is divided between those who can Just Do It and those who just can’t take that leap of faith for themselves.

When the time came for my partners and me to take that first step – we froze in anticipation. What if we don’t attract enough paying clients? How are we going to feed our families and pay our rent? (At the time, my wife and I had three children under the age of three and a sizable monthly mortgage payment for our first home.) What if we don’t get along as business partners? What if we fail? Will we be able to get our old jobs back?

Of course, in the face of fear and anxiety, we all tend to make excuses, delay decisions, procrastinate and become paralyzed. In our case, it was a matter of when to pull the trigger, when to walk into the office of our current ad agency’s boss and say: “I’m quitting.” At that fateful moment, I found the courage to Just Do It. I took that leap of faith (faith in myself) to quit my job and to start a new company – with no money, no clients, no employees, no office… just a dream that something better was ahead of me.

Today that company I helped start has blossomed and transformed (with many twists and turns along the way) into a global agency of 1,500 employees and the best clients anyone could ask for, including Nike. Living and working in Silicon Valley has allowed me to meet many of the world’s most exciting entrepreneurs, who all share the Just Do It DNA.

Now Is The Best Time To Be An Entrepreneur

Today you can start your own company, start your own adventure as an entrepreneur, with more resources and more support than ever before available. Technology offers tools that allow anyone to start a business, if one is prepared to take the first step.

Blogs and online content, including LinkedIn Today, and books, such as Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start, provide blueprints for business plans and recommendations on how to get started. Clubs, courses and even schools (for example, Draper University of Heroes) teach entrepreneurship and business fundamentals.

There’s absolutely no excuse for not starting your company due to lack of funding. Not with incubators and accelerators springing up in every large city; and angel investors and venture capitalists clamoring to put money into your new business. (I’ve even joined the ranks of venture capitalists, as President of WPP Ventures, my “second job.”) A crowd of crowdfunding sites, such as Kickstarter and Crowdfunder, gives another opportunity to raise money. One Kickstarter-funded company alone, Pebble, raised more than $10 million of pledges for its smartwatch product idea. Nice one!

Technology used to be a barrier to entry for startups – but that’s no longer true. In 1990, our agency started on a single Macintosh 128K computer, although we quickly upgraded to the powerful Macintosh SE/30. ;-) Most companies today can get off the ground with a few laptops and smartphones. Need cloud hosting? Amazon, Rackspace and a host of cloud providers are standing by. Need sales automation or HR and financial management software? Salesforce, Workday and other SaaS options put every software solution within reach of any small business.

Social media certainly make telling your story and finding employees easier than ever. Does anyone really need more than Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter to get the word out about their new company?

There are simply fewer and fewer excuses not to Just Do It.

Just Doing It Starts With A Dream

As I look back on what gave me the inspiration to start my first company, and when I help mentor young entrepreneurs, I often think about a great quote from the poet Pamela Vaull Starr that was scribbled in my high school yearbook: “Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.”

To be an entrepreneur, one must be a dreamer willing to reach out and grab for something higher, to let go of ties to the old and familiar and reach for something new.

I am confident that this dreaming, this reaching is what defines the entrepreneur. And what’s the downside? Well as famous ad man Leo Burnett said, “When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either.”

So my best advice is to Just Do It.

Good luck and enjoy the journey.

Photo: Satish Krishnamurthy/Flickr

Postscript. The irony is that LinkedIn’s Executive Editor Dan Roth has been encouraging me to start writing for LinkedIn Influencers for many months, but I was procrastinating and pushing off writing my first post. When LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner told me to “Just Do It,’ then I figured it was time to get off my ass and start writing. Hope you will come along for the ride.