Advice For The Entrepreneur - Where To Begin
One of my associates once asked me "if you had your wallet taken
away from you and you were dropped out of the sky into a strange
city with nothing but the shirt on your back, what would you do
and how long would it take to get financially established?"
I liked the challenge of the idea and thought long and hard
about the answer. To be honest, I can essentially say the
difficulty would be overcome by time but it would not be
insurmountable within say in under 6 months. I believe for the
sake of the exercise, you would define "financially established"
as say $100,000. With this amount you could properly begin to
utilize leverage through other people's money and take loans for
real estate. This is where the real compounding would begin.
Within another 6 months I would have $1 million give or take, or
at least be definitely on my way to a million. It's this first
$100,000 that would be the real challenge. With experience you
know exactly what you would do. If you hadn't done anything like
it before, (make $100,000 in 6 months) then you may find it more
of a challenge.
The biggest challenge in this situation would be not having
intimate knowledge and experience in this hypothetical city.
Knowing what's available and where to find the things you need
is a big obstacle that it takes time to establish contacts and
takes time to accumulate the experiences you need to drive that
business to a point where you are taking real profits.
So, broke, no money, no contacts and nowhere to live. The first
thing I would do even before I found a place to live is to find
some easily accessible retail markets. Of course without a
single dime to my name, I would be forced to avoid commercial
rental premises. What I mean is find places where crowds gather.
Fairs, trash and treasure markets, pavilions, I would take note
of anywhere that people congregate en mass for recreational or
consumer purposes as long as it was open air and was accessible
to me without needing to pay for the exposure.
Without a single dime to my name, I would be forced to start at
the very bottom. I would have to offer some sort of impulse
service. I am working on establishing a seed capital account of
around $500 and will have to do what it takes to get to this
point. It would depend on your own personal skills and
personality. I could find an old crate and borrow a black marker
to make a sign and give neck and shoulder rubs for $10 for 15
minutes. Maybe I could busk as a humourist and make a large
racket and get a crowd to gather. It would really depend on the
circumstances I find what I would do here, but I would have to
be restricted to offering some sort of service that people will
be readily willing to pay for.
I would probably have to spend a few nights sleeping out in the
cold, so I can preserve my seed capital but once I had $500 I
could begin my entrepreneurial activities and compound my seed
capital. I would work on sending out the whole $500 out on a
daily basis to work for me. Working on a mark up of say 30% I
could compound that into $5000 within say 2 weeks.
To make the money work for me, I would become a middle man (my
favourite place to be) I would seek out retailers and
wholesalers and make deals. Whether it's fresh fish or leather
hand bags or a mixture of both (fish leather handbags?) it makes
no difference, the only goal here is to make a minimum profit of
30% or more. I am sure I would experience some windfalls here or
there where I have 100% days but I wouldn't count on them.
Once I had a network established, I would hire some reliable
labour to continue with pick ups and deliveries, while I began
to scout around for investment objects and start investing in
high demand small ticket items. Cars, boats, etc. Items that
will offer a quick turn over.
Real estate is my ultimate goal, but I think over time I could
quite confidently move towards that goal and get to the point
where finance was possible and real estate investment was the
next step.
To your health and rapid success, Martin Thomas(c)