Starting your own business - the joys and pains!

I wonder how many of you have started your own business? After 20 years of corporate recruitment leadership roles, I have launched my own executive coaching firm. It is fun, exhilarating and scary at the same time.

The biggest joys so far have been the freedom to create the firm the way I want to and the engagement of five clients during the first month of operation. The challenges have been developing business and marketing plans, budgets, incorporating as an s-corp and having to do everything myself! Yes, I have outsourced a few things (legalzoom.com and logoworks.com are amazing) but I still make the coffee in the morning, empty the trash at night and everything else in between.

Any words of wisdom to share with me and others? Anything that you know now, that you would have liked to have known when you first started? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Carlos Adame
carlosadame@ceacoaching.com
951.972.4851

Comment by Michael Saulnier on June 25, 2008 at 6:36pm: One of the important decisions you will have to make is whether the business will be YOU... or whether you will leverage the talent of others to grow.

The upside of the busines being YOU, is that you have total control over it, know everything that's going on, and can control the deliverables your client receives.

One downside is that the business is YOU. Once you reach your capacity, you can't grow. All the risk is centered on your ability to develop new clients while performing services for others. Plus you have all the business owner's responsibilities for financing, payroll, accounting, insurance, collections, and on and on...

One possibility is to continue your marketing efforts even after you're engaged, so that as soon as you can, there's enough business to add another provider. Even if they are just a consultant... then hopefully another and another until you reach the point where you're RUNNING your business not BEING it.

As far as outsourcing is concerned, I'm confident that most people will make more money building their business instead of dealing with the hassles of running it.

I've helped hundreds of other people like you by taking away the "employer" part of operating their business including the money to pay the consultants while waiting for your clients to pay, running the payroll, invoicing and collections, and doing all the other "employer" activity.

If you're interested in learning more about how this works, contact me off-line and I'll be happy to share this information with you.

Good luck with your new enterprise!

Michael
michael@staffup.com