The Reality of Starting a Business from Zero
This is What Zero Looks Like — Many aspiring entrepreneurs get stuck at zero, mistaking endless planning for progress. If you’re ready to face the realities of entrepreneurship, from embracing ignorance to taking action, here’s how to make real strides forward.
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This is what zero looks like.
Aspiring entrepreneurs will spend years thinking about the idea, maybe even a dozen ideas that COULD work but they haven't taken the leap yet.
Maybe you did take the leap but it's all in your mind and that is where you stopped. It’s a lie you tell yourself so you can feel like you accomplished something, in reality you haven't actually done a single useful thing yet.
“Still doing research”
“Still setting up the business”
Maybe you have said that for months or years…
It tastes better to say you are working on it than to admit, you don't know what you are doing, so you haven't done a thing yet.
I have talked to a lot of men and women in that boat, wanting to build something but so buried in doubt and uncertainty they can't even make the jump from zero.
If that's you let me promise you something: Staying at zero, forever telling yourself you are almost ready to dive in, is torture. If you aren't going to do it, then just stop and enjoy your life. There is NO SHAME in deciding this isn’t for you.
I’ll tell you something else, no one knows what they are doing, at everything they are doing, and no one is doing everything they say they are doing.
So if this is for you, if becoming an entrepreneur is for you. If you have the grit to deal with the insane work it takes to be successful. You will need to get REALLY comfortable with being ignorant and wrong.
If you can eat crap, on repeat, for years while learning the skills you can make it.
Be OK with being wrong and asking for help, asking for advice and saying I don’t know.
It isn't fun to admit you are three years into “business” and don’t understand a balance sheet. (this was me)
It isn't fun to admit that you have sold millions in e-commerce, have 10,000 email contacts and have no idea how to send emails... Let alone compelling emails that convert. (this was also me)
“I don’t know” tastes like dog crap when you should know.
But success is on the other side of embracing every encounter where you can admit there is something important and you don't understand it.
It feels like admitting your ignorance will make you a fraud but that's backward…
…pretending you are not ignorant makes you a fraud, and it will kill every chance you have at success.
Not admitting ignorance, nearly cost me a fortune.. again.
Last week I hired a commercial leasing agent to get help finding blind spots while rebuilding a commercial lease for my property.
It was time to renew the contract and I flat-out didn’t understand it.
We started with the old contract and modified it to properly fit our needs.
Among a dozen other things I was not aware of, I found out the old lease we so poorly written, if I had left it alone and re-signed as is, I would have left over $40,000 on the table and would have been open to MASSIVE damages should anything have gone wrong…
Not admitting ignorance, nearly cost me $100,000.
When it was written last time, I was unwilling to admit that half my net-worth was tied up in something I didn’t understand and refused to ask for help.
The most important lesson I have learned over and over again:
Always be willing to admit what you don’t know, and if it's important, learn it.
First 11 steps for starting a new business.
Last week we talked about the software stack I would deploy (and do deploy) when I start a new business. That is just the basics, but it helps to have some guidance.
Here is the short recap:
- Buy your domain with Cloudflare
- Get a custom, branded email with Google Workspace
- Manage passwords with Bitwarden
- Create a website and collect contacts with MailerLite
This week, a friend who was looking to start his business asked for some advice on how exactly to get started. I wrote up a quick “Starting from Scratch” document to help him with the initial 7-Steps or business formation
You can download the PDF here:
