I wish I’d never started my business.

This article is for me, 7 years ago.

The ‘me’ that didn’t have a fucking clue what I was doing.

Back then I thought GradTouch was going to be a billion pound company.

It's probably not going to be a 100 million pound company.

Hell, there’s a still a chance we could go bust. That thought is always there, buried deep at the back of my mind and I think it'll always be there until the day I walk away from it all.

Running a business is nothing like what you expect at the beginning. It's the best life lesson anyone could ever have but it's the single hardest thing I have ever done in my life.

One day, I'm hoping, I'll be able to walk away from it all, to take some cash and figure out what the next journey looks like. Obviously, the cash would set me up, sure, but it's not going to be "fuck you" money.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’ve learnt that, for most people who ‘make it’; it takes a long time to accrue wealth. You build a business, sell a business, build another business, sell that business, make some investments, build another business, sell another business, maybe chuck a bit into property. Making big money is a long process for most. It takes a life time.

23-year-old Zac expected things to be quicker. I thought I’d be on a yacht by now, sipping Dom Pérignon and "livin' my best life".

But, as I’ve matured and begun to understand what business is truly about, I’ve grown to realise that it’s not about "fuck you" money. Sure, cash give you freedom and comfort to you and your family. But what it's actually all about is learning and taking all you can from the process, from the journey.

Talking of the journey, one of the hardest parts for me has been keeping the money flowing. I think that’s the hardest part of any business. That’s why people try and raise investment. They’ve got this ‘big idea’ and, in their eyes, the only way to get it off the ground is to raise money. I’m realising now, how hard and ridiculous the notion of trying to raise investment is when you’ve never worked in an industry before, and you have no idea of how big or small the market is. Raising money at the start is really hard.

When we first raised money, we definitely didn’t understand graduate recruitment. We understood some of the problems, first-hand, but not the way the industry worked. We didn’t have a clue who the decision-makers were – the one’s that held the purse strings.

We’re in an extremely incumbent industry, and trying to get people to change what they do is a tough ask. Everything is very much entrenched and set in stone. Every major client has a budget, which they split between 3 or 4 of our competitors, and they’ve done that for twenty years.

Do you want to know the truth?

If we’d actually known something about the industry, we would’ve gone, “nah, we’re not gonna bother doing that.”

You see, when we were getting into it we were like, “right let's raise some money, let's just try and build something and let's just see what happens.” Whereas, if we’d sat back and looked at the market properly, we’d have seen what could and couldn’t be done.

I think the point is, people building startups, especially for the first time, don’t do enough research into their market. They go "oh, well that would make sense if something did that", but just because something makes sense, doesn't mean the market will care about it.

We've been battling hard, particularly over the last three years to try and change people's perceptions of how they should engage with a millennial audience, and people are only just starting to change now.

And here’s the really hard truth, which both startup founders and investors need to get their heads around:

It cost us a lot more to get to where we are than we thought it would.

But, as fresh-faced grads, with visions of a billion pound business, we got straight to raising money, without much market knowledge.

We raised money because we thought, “students and graduates can’t get a job, let’s help them get a job,” when, in reality, if we’d known the industry, we’d have said, “let’s go and find a bigger industry, with bigger problems, and have the opportunity to make more money.” Because regardless of whether you’re trying to build a 2 million, 20 million or 200 million pound business, it’s just as much hard work.

If I knew then what I know now (Ah, the old cliché) I would've gone into an industry, learnt something, then set out on my own and tried to do a better version of it.

What we did, was go into an industry thinking it's broken, having graduated university and finding it hard to get a job, but not actually knowing anything about the market itself or the monetary side.

It amazes me everyday though as to what we've actually achieved. GradTouch is finally making waves. I'm starting to feel like we're really getting somewhere.

I just could never have imagined that it would have taken this long to get here.

To be continued…