Some people would think that in order to start business, you need to work and that you need to accumulate capital.
There are two parts to this. The first is yes, you do you need a lot of experience to start a business. The second part is you do need a lot of capital.
A question people ask, do you need a lot of experience in a certain business to start a business, I would say yes, you do.
But people say I’ve never worked before and they ask, “Where did you get the experience from”.
Well here’s some of my personal experience that will answer this question.
Well I did work. It’s just that I started very, very young. And in fact a lot of the work that I did was voluntary work. I was not paid but yes, I did.
Like for example, the first business I ever started was the mobile disco business. I started at 15 years old and for those of you who do not know what a mobile disco is; basically you own a set of equipment, lighting, sound system. And when people have got parties, like for example birthday parties, functions, dinner and dance, you go up there, you set up the disco.
And in fact, before I set up that mobile disco company, I learned it from another company by working for them part time as a DJ. Even before that, I went to my own parties and that’s how it started basically
The next part is about capital. Well, do you need a bit of capital? It took me $2,000 to start my mobile disco company. A lot of people have this mindset, that you need hundreds of thousands and from my personal experience, no you don’t, you can start with just a few thousand dollars.
In fact, if you asked me, I think having a lot of money to start a business is a curse sometimes. You know why? Because when you have got a lot of money, you tend to spend it. In fact, out of all my businesses, the only business which I truly invested a lot of money in was my interior design business. I invested a quarter million dollars only to lose it in a year.
The strategy is that when you’ve got no money in starting a business, it forces you to be creative; it forces you to think of ways to do things without needing money. And when I started, all the costs were kept variable. We didn’t rent our own place. We couldn’t afford it, so we worked out of our house and other people’s company.
When we had no business, we have no costs and all the costs were variable and most of the staff we hired were freelancers or interns or people we paid on a project basis so all the costs were variable. There were no risks at all. A lot of the stuff we use were our own personal computers so again there was no costs at all.
Therefore sometimes it requires a willingness to learn as well as thinking out of the box. So hopefully these personal experiences will help answer the questions of those of you who are seeking to start your own business.
