The 3 Steps to Starting your first Company while Working a Job -- a Breakdown

You have ideas in your head that won't go away.

The work you're getting paid to do currently is fine, but you dream about life beyond paychecks, PTO, and 401ks.

You want freedom. You want to start your own company.

Where do you begin?

Here:

1. Change Your Mindset

We want to own our business, achieve "financial freedom", and other things, because we feel like life will be so much better when we do.

It's true. Life can be a lot better.

I spend way more time with my kids now than when I worked a job.

I don't ask anyone's permission to take time off.

I don't feel that back of mind worry that my boss and co-workers are judging me for not being at work.

But, this isn't how it starts out.

Getting a business going is one of the toughest things I've ever done.

It requires of all of you.

We often underestimate how much it takes to get things done.

We underestimate the drain on our mental health.

We underestimate the stress that being in charge of everything brings.

Your journey to financial freedom and entrepreneurship is going to be tough, and no matter how much you love it, will flat-out suck a lot of the time.

Embrace this. Prepare for the mundanity, the unsexy, and the boring.

If you can mentally prepare, (even though you can never truly know what it will be like until you do it) the better.

Still excited?

2. Picking and Validating the Right Idea

You probably already have a business idea if you're considering getting started on something.

You've probably dreamt about how it will work and how awesome it's going to be.

It's fun, isn't it?

Put those dreams on paper and then in a drawer for later.

You need to make sure people are going to actually pay you for what you're wanting to do.

So how do you do that?

Interview 5-10 people you plan on helping with your product around the problem your product or service plans to solve.

How do they view their problem? What is the end result they are truly wanting?

Odds are they don't want your product, they want the result your product will bring.

If you can make sure your product and service will deliver on that result, you'll have more success in marketing, sales, and customer satisfaction.

You'll know why people will hire your product or service.

After you've conducted these interviews, build the simplest version of your product or service that achieves the end result.

Demonstrate to the people you've interviewed, and then charge them half of what you plan on charging at full price to get beta testers.

If they pay you for what you've built or will do for them, congratulations, you now have a validated idea.

If you're working a job, you should be spending about 2 hours per day outside of work on this.

3. Scale to the Point You Can Quit Your Job

Once you have a validated idea, you need to focus on building the simplest version of your business as possible and to scale that.

Unneeded complexity in business cripples profit.

You need to ask the big 3 questions:

What do I do to get customers?

How do I make sure I deliver when I get the customer?

How do I build systems and processes to remove me from the day to day of the business?

I'll go through each of these briefly.

Getting customers--

Getting your first customers is grunt work.

It's finding where your target market is, and using the language you dissected from your initial interviews to see if they have the problem your product or service solves.

Building a process around getting customers is vital.

If you can consistently get customers, you can stay in the game long enough to continually improve the product to exceed customer's expectations.

Marketing and sales should be the forefront of everything you do.

The product or service comes after - and your job is simply that it does the job you're marketing and selling that it will do.

Making sure you deliver--

This part is a lot easier and required a lot of feedback. You should be very involved with your first customers.

Chatting with them often, asking for feedback, try to observe how to improve the product so that they're happy.

Happy customers make sales and marketing a lot easier.

The key to happy customers is understanding what's the core job they're wanting done and making sure that's what the product does.

Building systems and processes--

Once you are consistently getting clients, working closely with your first customers to gather feedback, it's time to implement systems and processes.

Think of systems and processes as the "manual" for your business.

You could write down everything you're doing and hand it to someone else who could then run the business off of the manual.

Thinking this way forces you to be "systems minded", meaning you will think about how someone else could do the things you're doing.

When you're starting out though, it's not important that someone could do exactly what you're doing.

Find what works, then figure out how someone else or something else could do it.

Eliminate. Automate. Delegate.

If you can validate your idea, consistently get clients, deliver, and then systemitize, you can have a running, profitable business pretty quickly.

I've most definitely simplified the process of getting a business going, but it needs to be simple.

You should constantly be asking yourself, "What would this look like if it were easy?".

After you have a validated idea, commit to it for 6 months.

Validation should take anywhere from 1-3 months.

Get to work!