the in your face guide to start a business - part 2
This is a continuation of the in your face guide to start a business tutorial meant to help people start up without making the mistakes I’ve made.
Think Big, Start Somewhere
I don’t believe in starting a business small. If you’re going to do something, be great at it. Don’t be a run of the mill IT company. Don’t just be a kedai masak. Think BIG! All my business plans were huge undertakings. I do not believe in playing for 2nd place. I won’t be a small business person. No.
What I mean is, not to restrict yourself to just one market. I’ve seen too many people starting an IT company with 2 men, and not really having a product or service that defines them.
This is what you call run of the mill. They’re everywhere.
But when you look at Verbeter Group, you think of security. Can you name me another small IT business person that makes a name for himself like this?
Yes, I started out reselling someone else’s products and services, but I built a portfolio around it. This makes my business unique (and we’ll touch on this in another article). I agree that doing big business is too much for one man, so I just started somewhere. Where? Start with just one thing. Do one thing, and do it well.
That has become my mantra. Do just one thing and do it well. But didn’t I say think BIG?! Am I contradicting myself? No. There’s a difference between doing and thinking. I’ve thought big. And by this, I meant my infrastructure. Not my size. I started the business thinking of the future first. Not the present. I laid my operations plan on how to do things quickly, better.
One of the things that I did was to invest in technology. I want to be reachable all over the world, and so I invested in a web hosting business to use its servers as my storefront. I didn’t need to buy servers, I only needed to buy the space and bandwidth. I used it as my integrated business system, running open source CRM systems and keeping track of leads and sales. It is an overkill coz my sales were not high yet, so I chucked it aside and used office productivity software instead. This kept costs extremely low and I didn’t need to take in a lot of time to develop or customise the CRM systems.
But I didn’t just jump on the Windows wagon. A lot of small businesses use Windows because they are familliar with the system. They use MS Office coz that’s the only thing that they’re comfortable in. But I worked on Linux and Macintosh systems instead and my productivity has never been better. I’ve never fallen to a virus, stalling my work. And my systems have never crashed. I use only Apple’s iWorks and I build business documents faster and better than people on Windows.
A lot of people just use any Windows systems, some as old as Windows 98. But shelling out that 1.6k was the best investment I made.
Do just one thing and do it well
I’ve seen businessmen who do just about anything for their customers. My previous employment, an IT company sold t-shirts to their clients. I didn’t get it. Why are we selling something completely unrelated to IT?? I’ve also seen some of my competition doing the same thing. I don’t understand why do they combine so many businesses like printing, to IT to virtual addresses to whatever you can think of all into one business entity?
Look at Verbeter Group. We may be a group, but we do just one thing. How are we doing?
United States Dollars Five Thousand and Seventy Eight and Cents Ninety-Two
This is my Christmas Present. I sold over 20 licenses of server antivirus software to the Maldives Government through one of my bigger resellers, a quasi-government IT consultancy.
I’ve gone past the $10,000 mark in gross revenue, and I didn’t do a lot of marketing. All I needed to do was get in touch with the right people.
Where is Verbeter Group going towards now? We’ll see lah. I’m not about to give away everything what. Hahaha.
Inspired to start a business? Great! Just don’t sell soap.
Anyway, that’s a lot of money right? Yup. And I didn’t need to do MLM like a lot of people. In fact, the profits gained from MLM are so small, you won’t be able to earn this much sideline income if you sold 10,000 units of your own health and beauty supplements.
A lot of people are hit by the entrepreneurism bug. Everyone wants to get rich. Everyone wants to be a millionaire. These are all good dreams.
But I will never believe in MLM. I’ve seen businessmen sway away from their business because of their inefficiency and ineptness coz they think they can earn more through selling soap.
I created this mantra, “Don’t sell soap”, after going to countless Amway seminars and other MLM businesses that have reached our shores. I’ve stopped going to such seminars since 2 and a half years ago.
I’m sure I’ll be raising the hornets nest, knowing a lot of my friends that are involved in this (this is afterall the in your face guide). But if you can show me a US dollar cheque just like mine, with better returns, through selling soap in just 4 months, then I’ll take that back. I’ll even throw in a nice S$100 cheque.
But face it, you don’t earn big bucks by sidelining. You earn it through focus and consistency. You zero in on your goal, on your dreams, and you keep doing whatever it is that seems to work. And God willing, you’ll reach it.