To Start (up) or not to Start (up), that is the question...!

For anyone thinking about starting their own company, my advice is to follow the Nike slogan - i.e. "Just do it"!

Seriously though, I know how frustrating it is to know that you've got so much more to offer than your current employer recognises - yet not feel entirely convinced that you have what it takes to start a business on your own.

If you wait until you're sure, you'll be retired already. No-one is ever 100% ready. We all learn as we go. We all make mistakes. Having said that, there are some basic guidelines that will improve your chances of success.

If your goal is to create a profitable company, you need to be selling something to somebody. Do not mistake having an audience for having a business.

In Grad School, they spend excruciatingly long periods of time getting you to work on and create business plans. Without wishing to sound disrespectful to all business school faculty, at best, a lengthy business plan is an unproven theory about how your business could work. Lengthy business plans rarely survive their first contact with actual customers.

The author of the best-selling book titled "40 Rules of Internet Business Success", Matthew Paulson suggests " in lieu of creating an extended business plan or not creating a plan at all, create instead a one-to-two page document outlining the basic components of your business model".

This will help you make sure you that you have all of your bases covered and will help you process how you communicate what your business does to other interested parties. In this 1-2 page document, you should:

* Describe your potential target markets.

* Describe your product or service with attention to its features, benefits, and customer solutions.

* Discuss product marketing and initial marketing channels you plan to use to acquire customers.

* Outline your delivery process: which people, skills, equipment and software do you need to provide your product or service to your customer?

* Include a rough estimate of your company's finances based on product pricing and estimated expenses in the first year.

* Know how many customers you will need to have to break even.

In my opinion, anyone who is serious about testing their theory about having a viable business model should get access to, and learn to use, Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas - https://strategyzer.com/platform/resources

There's a lot more that you have to consider - however, if you can answer the above questions honestly and the result makes sense, you might have a shot at raising investor interest.

And for those who have already reached what is commonly known as the Proof of Concept stage, or better still the Minimal Viable Product stage or MVP, and are now looking for funding, here is a timely article about what some very well known investors want to see in your presentation - more commonly known as your pitch deck or just deck - https://www.techinasia.com/investors-hear-business-pitch.

I wish you the best of luck - and would love to hear your stories whether you're a first time entrepreneur, or someone who could write a book about how to Start-up a new business venture.