Running your own business sucks…

…then it feels amazing, then it sucks again, you feel elated and then like a total failure, you nail it, you feel invincible and then it sucks again…

An overview of the last few years of our journey? 

Nope. 

That was a summary of the last 24 hours. Want an insight into the next 24? Copy paste the above <here> 

Starting up and establishing your own business is a white-knuckle roller coaster ride. Doing it during a global pandemic when budgets are being cut and everyone is battening down the hatches makes things even tougher.

And yet despite the unprecedented slowdown in global economic activity brought about by the Corona Pandemic, 2020, saw around 85,000 more new businesses registered in the UK than in 2019. Germany & France have both logged substantial increases in new company registrations, whilst in the US, business formation applications were up 82 per cent in the three months to September 2020 compared with the same quarter the previous year.   

That the pandemic and everything that has come with it have spurned a new wave of company registrations is more than a statistic. It tells us a story about the indomitability of human nature and the knack we have of spotting opportunity amidst upheaval and uncertainty. All over the world, people who may have toyed with the idea of starting up for years suddenly found themselves furloughed, made redundant, with time on their hands to reflect, look at the state of the world and think, “f**k it, life’s too short, it’s now or never”… And formed their own businesses.  

Hopefully soon, we will come out of lockdown and the world will reopen. What is still part of our present, will become the past and we will be able to look back and reflect on this once in a century event and say the worst is finally over. We’ll look back and mourn the tragic loss of life. Countless other stories of individual human hardships will be told. The repercussions will be felt for years to come. But we’ll also see these times were a catalyst for innovation, spurning new ideas, different ways of doing things and 1000s of new companies. A load of stuff which together all equals change – periods of upheaval always tend to do that. 

But while the end prize may be a renaissance in innovation and creativity, that doesn’t mean the journey between here and there won’t be a balls-out slog, peppered with the sort of daily emotional extremes we described above. 

In our travels through Linkedin, blogs, events and everything in-between we often see content written by founders who have been there and done it. Successful people who’ve worked incredibly hard, had success and want to share their wisdom. 

Their content is incredibly valuable. But when you’re starting out for the first time, it can also feel intimidating, like looking up at someone 15,000 feet above you while wondering how you are going to make next month’s payroll.

Two years into Black Paint, we have worked with some incredible brands, delivered digital work we’re incredibly proud of, made a TV Ad, had some well fought-for losses and seen off agencies five times our size in pitches. It has been incredible fun but at times very challenging. 

So, we thought we would write this from the point of view of a small business, still in the early part of the journey and share a few things we have learned ...

Starting your own business is a bit like becoming a parent. 

There is no instruction manual. You can read up, learn from others, have opinions on what kind of parent you want to be, even work with kids every day as a teacher, nanny or childminder. But you never really know what it is like to be a parent until you have your own kids and get down to the daily business of parenthood. 

Your love for them is disproportionate. Everything they do, and you do for them carries a weight of responsibility. They constantly throw you curveballs, you constantly need to pivot and adapt your approach. You love them but sometimes they drive you nuts and more often than not, at the end of the day you’re exhausted. 

And despite all that, you wouldn’t change it for the world. 

Somewhere along the way, you realise you need to embrace the chaos, make it as much fun as possible and most of all, enjoy the journey. Otherwise, what’s the point. 

Planning is important but doing is everything.  

Or to be more specific, reality is the ultimate measurement tool of good, bad, irrelevant or just plain pointless plans. 

When my wife was having our first child, she wanted a homebirth in a pool, wanted it to be totally natural, in a room bathed with soothing mood lighting and weird new-age music. No painkillers – and definitely no epidural.

Did any of that happen? To hell it did! The onset of Preeclampsia late in pregnancy sent the notion of a homebirth in a pool out the window. An induced labour had my wife screaming in agony at the doctor to get her an epidural NOW! And if I had been silly enough to suggest dimming the lights or getting the new-age playlist going, she probably would have punched me. 

As a business owner, I look back on this experience as an important lesson in cold, hard pragmatism. In the heat of a stressful situation we acted with complete clarity. Ditching our original plans and making new ones which were a far more effective response to the real-world conditions we found ourselves in.  

Importantly, the decisions we made were the ones needed to get the result we wanted – A beautiful, healthy baby girl. 

Takeout: Stay focused on the end-goal but be flexible on how you get there. Humans have a tendency to attach undue emotional importance to the plans they make. But clinging on to notions or ideas that don’t stack up in the real world is pointless. Plans are just things you think up, so you can be utterly ruthless in killing them, they won’t care. 

Plans or tactics are just the means, it’s the end result that’s the point.

So, do your research, assess if there’s a need for your product or model, create a business plan, decide who your customers will be, what services you will offer, even the type of values and culture you want in your business (These things ARE important). But don’t spend months in isolation honing them to what you deem to be perfection. Get on with the ‘doing’ bit as quickly as possible. You will get real-world feedback and many of your best laid plans will evolve, change or just go out of the window. What you end up with will be a far more relevant set of tools to get you where you want to be. 

Assess the risks, make plans... But at some point you just need to go for it.

Before founding Black Paint, I was running a department at one of the biggest Ad agencies in the world. After that, I ran a business with offices in NYC and the Cayman Islands. Great roles, big salaries. 

Then, in a move which depending on which part of the daily emotional roller-coaster I am on when you ask, I will describe as either bold/na?ve/ crazily brave or just plain crazy, I jacked it all in and me and the family moved to Berlin, with no jobs but on a mission to set up a business.

And here we are a few years later. We are on an amazing journey, our life is an adventure…But wow, it ain’t been easy. There have been a few dark moments when I’ve looked in the mirror and thought “What the hell was I thinking!”.

And actually, I’m pretty glad we didn’t overthink it before we took the plunge – If we had foreseen every challenge we would have to deal with along the way, I am fairly certain we wouldn’t have done it. 

But that doesn’t mean we didn’t do any planning at all. 

A year before we took the plunge, I sat down and worked out how much we needed to live, how long we could survive off our savings. We downsized the place we rented to a nice but much smaller, cheaper property and banked as much money as we could while I was still in a full-time job.

We planned for the long-game - How we would survive with a multiple years’ timeline in mind… Not months. 

I am constantly surprised by how many early stage and soon-to-be founders, don’t do this planning and believe that by the end of year one, they will be earning the big bucks. Or who bolt for the door after a few months because living on less becomes too uncomfortable or a point of resentment. Or that they read a few books about people like Jeff Bezos, getting down on his hands and knees and packing books for customers in his parent’s garage during the early days of Amazon. But when the time comes for them to bootstrap and get back to the floor, they have no taste for that sort of work. 

The Takeout: If you start a business, you may have overnight success, but most likely it will be years of hard work. Sign up to the fact that in any given day you will go from high level business planning, to scrabbling around on the floor doing stuff you may not have done since you got your first job at 21. 

Do your maths on downsized living costs. Be comfortable with downsizing your standard of living and think hard about what that will mean in your day to day life. Make sure your loved ones are onboard. Steel yourself for a marathon not a sprint. And accept life will be unpredictable but bloody exciting. 

But don’t overthink it. Make sensible plans, but remember you can’t predict the future. At some point, you just need to make the leap of faith and trust in yourself that you’ll fix the rest as you go. 

Starting a business is a bit like being Eddie Murphy.

Remember the scene in Coming To America, where Eddie Murphy’s character Prince Akeem and his loyal servant Semmi go looking for their future wives in a Harlem night club?

At Black Paint, we talk about this scene as the perfect analogy of our experiences over the last two years

Just like the beginning of the club scene when Prince Akeem and Semmi, first enter the bar, wide eyed and eager to please, we embarked on our first few rounds of client acquisition, seminars and networking events with naive optimism. 

And just like the dating montage in Coming To America, where Eddie Murphy meets a succession of potential partners who were definitely not marriage material, we met quite a cast of characters – Snake oil salesmen, timewasters, potential clients with a great brief that turned out to be no brief at all. 

We wised up, learned a lot and with perseverance, found amazing people to work with and some incredible clients. 

Takeout: Leaving a full-time job and starting your own company is like jumping off an air-conditioned luxury coach in the middle of nowhere and hiking straight into the jungle with just a bottle of water and a machete. Be prepared that you will meet some interesting wildlife but also experience much more interesting scenery. 

Whether looking for clients, finding a suitable business partner, or early hires, pucker up and be prepared to kiss a few frogs before you find your keepers. And choose those keepers carefully, the fragile state of your cash flow in the early days may not be able to withstand a client that doesn’t want to pay, or a team member or business partner that doesn’t deliver.

Lots of little failures are inevitable and a good marker that you’re doing something innovative.

From a young age, we’re taught to be ashamed of failure. And we’ve seen more than a few new business owners lose heart after they hit their first bumps in the road. But failure is inevitable and essential. You’re trying things out you’ve never done before. It’s unrealistic to expect everything to work out on the first attempt.

Takeout: Lots of little failures are an inevitable part of the journey to success.  You will learn a lot more from your failures than your successes. Assess what went wrong, dust yourself off and keep going. You won’t make the same mistake again. Remember, it’s not meant to be easy. 

Creativity is just information connected in unexpected ways. 

Steve Jobs defined creativity brilliantly – It was something like “There are no new ideas, only new ways to connect existing ideas together.”

For us, this is the most accurate definition of creativity. Innovating unexpected combinations of ideas or existing elements to create something new is what creativity is all about whether you’re a lawyer, an engineer, investment banker or agency creative.

If you want to make unexpected creative connections, it’s a good idea to fill your head with as much information and stimulus as possible. The more inputs you have, the more potentially intersting connections you can make. 

But our lives often fall into routine, safety, familiarity and repetition. Which is the enemy of creative thinking.  

Takeout: Starting your own business is like a giant, triple espresso infused, slap in the face for your brain and a journey way out of your comfort zone. As a result, you will end up with new ideas to draw from and make new connections that might not have occurred to you before. 

Keep your eyes on the big picture, but don’t forget to get your head down and focus on the little steps 

For this one we’re going to quote something we read a while back from from Matt Higgins at RSE Ventures, which summed it up brilliantly. 

“Remember Newton’s first law of motion: An object in motion tends to stay in motion. 

Find a way to go one more day. Then another. String together a bunch of days, and you’ll buy yourself a week. One foot in front of the other for a few more weeks, and you’ll buy yourself a month. A year from now, look back and marvel at just how much distance you’ve covered and how bad things once were.

Just get in motion and stay in motion.”

The hardest one…Remembering that the destination is the journey 

Who doesn’t have a couple of words of wisdom from their mum that they hold dear through the years? 

My mum gave me this gem decades ago: “If you focus too much on the destination, you’ll miss all the scenery” 

Setting up your own business is not meant to be easy, but if you don’t enjoy the journey, what’s the point of doing it. You will learn a load and become more resilient as you persevere. Every piece of progress, every penny you earn and every win will feel sweeter than any others you have experienced. 

Which brings us back to those successful founders we talked about at the start. 

I know a few people who’ve done pretty well for themselves. They’ve grown businesses, sold businesses and made some decent cash. With money in the bank, I do not know one person who opted for a life of comfort. In fact, every single one of them decided to start again with brand new ventures. 

Ask them about how it feels the second time around, with all that experience under their belts, and you get a pretty consistent answer, which should reassure anyone doing it for the first time. 

They say something like…

“Running your own business sucks, then it feels amazing, then it sucks again, you feel elated and then like a total failure, you nail it, you feel invincible and then it sucks again…And that was just the last 24 hours”. 

Sound familiar? 

Perhaps the one difference them and us first time founders is that they know if you work incredibly hard and persevere, the early days’ emotional white knuckle rollercoaster ride eventually ends (Or at least evens out a little!), and one day you look up and find yourself with something called a viable, established business, a living breathing entity that has become bigger than you are. And a tremendous feeling of pride and achievement. 

If you want to come on the journey with us, or reach out for a chat and share your stories get in touch anytime, we’d love to hear from you. 

Adam Alexandroni is the Founder of Black Paint. A digital content and marketing agency based in Berlin. https://blackpaintagency.com

Sources for new business registration statistics: 

https://www.ft.com/content/3cbb0bcd-d7dc-47bb-97d8-e31fe80398fb

https://smallbusiness.co.uk/2020-set-to-be-record-year-for-new-companies-created-2551479/