The four conversations I wish I prepared for when I started my business

Look for advice on starting a business and you'll find a lot of people willing to give a lot of surface level advice.

More often than not, people talk tactics when giving business advice, and it's not hard to understand why. It's easy, doesn't require a lot of vulnerability and it helps sell whatever it is you want to sell to a clientele of new SME founders.

The problem with this is two-fold.

First, you rarely get the bigger picture advice you really need to put together your business roadmap. Second, you're only going to get advice on the stuff you search for - the stuff you already know that you don't know... but you think you need to know.

The known unknowns.

The things that I didn't know I, er, didn't know about, is what I'm here to share with you tonight - the unknown unknowns.

It really all boils down to four conversations I wish I had prepared for before I launched myself into starting a business.

Have a plan for these conversations and you will save a lot of energy, time, money and stress.

1. The purpose conversation

I started my first business when I was 14 years old - helping my peers learn to study and excel at school - or, how I put it at the time "Tutoring Year 7-10 Maths, Science and English".

The reason I started doing this was because the opportunity landed in my lap - I had my first customer before I had even thought about tutoring other students.

There was a need, there was cash and so I jumped on it.

The same thing happened when it came time to start Pacific Content, just over a decade later. There was a need, there was a customer and, at the time, a co-founder so, I jumped on it.

What were we starting? Why were we starting it?... to this day I can't tell you.

The conversation I wish I had was about the reason for Pacific Content to exist.

Knowing what I know now, I think this conversation would have helped me to pause and think about myself and my own passion rather than losing myself in the exciting buzz of becoming a new business founder.

Here's the questions I would have asked myself and my co-founder:

"Why do you want to do this?"

"What are we helping others achieve?"

"If we did the best job we possibly could do for the next 5 years, where do you think we'd be? How about in 10 years?"

"What do you consider "successful"

"When we're "successful" how do you want to spend your time day-to-day?"

"What are you prepared to sacrifice to get to that point?"

2. The money conversation

Money is a tricky thing to talk about at the best of times.

I think the reason I find it hard, and I'd be curious to know if others find this too, is that it's a discussion about my worth - my worth in dollars and cents.

How much is my work, my skills, my time worth?

When you start a business, the money conversation is a conversation you have to have not once, but over and over again.

You need to have it with your significant other, your co-founders, your business alliances, your suppliers, your customers.

In preparing for these discussions, here are the things I wish I would have thought about more:

1. What, in monetary terms am I willing to sacrifice in the short -term? What am I not willing to sacrifice? How long am I willing to do this?
2. What rules and boundaries need to be in place to ensure resentment isn't built up between parties overtime
3. At what point do I need to look at supplementing my income with a part-time job?
4. What is my backup plan? Who is involved and how can I be clear in what I'm asking them to do?
5. What am I willing to pay others for - how much is this worth in comparison to how much I'm worth?

3. The "who does what" conversation

When you start a business, you wear a hell of a lot of hats - you're the marketer, the salesperson, the bookkeeper, HR, the customer service rep, the website developer... everything you can learn to do means cash that stays in your pocket.

If you start a business with other founders, make sure you have a clear idea of what everyone is expected to do - and at what point you agree that you need to look at outsourcing the work, contracting someone in or bringing an employee onboard.

Here's what I know now that I didn't know then:

There are 5 key areas of the business that always need to be taken care of - no matter how small, to make sure that you're growing your business and keeping things on track - they are:

• Creating something of value
• Marketing
• Sales
• Servicing your customers
• Finance

So the conversation I wish I had was this:

For each of these 5 areas of business, what do we need to be doing on a yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily basis to ensure that we are heading in the direction we desire?

Of this to-do list, what are each of us able and willing to do or otherwise prepared to learn about to ensure business growth?

Of these things, what are the first tasks that we want to get off our own to-do lists and onto the list of someone we can outsource to or contract in?

4. The targets conversation

Without goals, objectives and KPIs, it's very hard to keep up your momentum and stay motivated.

Along with defining a clear purpose, I wish I would have had a conversation around the short and long term targets we needed to hit.

This conversation becomes the basis for many other conversations - the conversation with your prospects, your customers, your potential employees.

When you know how big you want to scale, and how quickly you want to scale, it makes it much easier to imagine your business as it will exist and not as it exists right now.

I didn't realise the importance of the target conversation until about 5-6 months into the business. I didn't start documenting targets until even later.

Here's some things to consider about the targets you want to set which will also help you in your dealings with other key stakeholders and how you prioritise your work:

• How many customers do you need to make the business viable?
• How many customers do you need to pay the founders/increase wages (based on conversations from point 2)?
• How much time is each founder/employee of the business able to put into acquiring customers and servicing customers?
• What is your reach:conversion rate and how can you improve this?
• How scaleable are your products and services? What can you automate, multiply or amplify?

You learn a lot in the first two years of running a consulting agency. Most importantly, you realise that life doesn't need to be spent doing drone work - instead it can be spent doing something that truly inspires you.

Today my mission is simple: To help 10,000 people escape the 9-5 grind to gain financial freedom by pursuing their passion and starting their own purpose-driven enterprise.

Thinking about making the change? Claim your free strategy session with me today.