Part 2 - The Real-Time Diary of an Aspiring Entrepreneur

Dip Your Toe into Entrepreneurialism

Here’s how it went for me...

I was a frustrated Recruiter – IT and HR for what it’s worth – frustrated at the silliness of employers’ attitudes towards recruiters and job-seekers. All too often employers arrogantly – and foolishly – expect everything and everyone to fit into their own convenient business processes. Wanting their cake and eating it, is what I’m alluding to here. That attitude could only work if every possible candidate for a job was full-on desperate, which we know is not the case. So employers will continue to miss out on lots of good talent, and deservedly so.

Anyway, job-seekers started offering me money that I couldn’t accept, for coaching – that is to say, coaching them through the job-seeking process; which is not unreasonable given job-seeking has changed so much since social media came along. An HR Director offered to pay me ￡200 just to have a chat with her out-going HR Manager as a kind of impromptu ad-hoc outplacement service. If you’re wondering why I couldn’t accept money from job-seekers, well that’s because taking money from both client and job-seeker is a conflict of interests. Probably illegal too.

This got me thinking: I do like to help people, maybe I should do this job-seeker advocacy thing full-time?

And so I flirted with the notion that I should set up a company to do just that. Flirted?…I hear you say. Yes, flirted.

I had twenty minutes to kill before heading off to play some sweet trumpet jazz at my weekly swing band rehearsal, and was reminded of a popular website-building company. So I dipped my toe in. I got a free account and started with one of their suggested business templates and spewed out some vaguely relevant information – top-of-my-head type stuff for job-seekers. I then played around with the graphics, layout, basic features and the like; and was quickly snared into their rather impressive free platform.

And that’s the way of things these days; you get something for free which lures you in, until you realise “Hey, I think maybe I should throw a little money at this”. And frankly, I’m okay with that. It’s really just a try-before-you-buy sort of deal.

So I became immersed in creating a full-on website and the journey to understand and master digital marketing.

I’m going to end this Part 2 of the series here, because I want you to think about creating a website as a means of making your business idea more real. Just play around with the notion like I did and it becomes more real without the pain of fully committing.

How would you pitch your business idea or expertise to customers? Stop just conceptualising, and take that next step. You don’t have to publish your website until later on, but it’s a worthy exercise for anyone thinking of going it alone or creating an additional source of income.

Go on, dip your toe in!

Part 3 is part-way written and will come out almost immediately after this article. (Between you and me, that’s because I just found this ‘Part 2’ article having forgotten I’d even written it!) In Part 3, I'll mention more about my building-a-website learning curve.

p.s. Speaking of functionality...I'll soon start adding videos to this series of articles.