Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

Napoleon Bonaparte

‘Okay, so I can see why I’d want to be a specialist instead of a generalist; and to be honest, it’s a bit of a relief to have permission to focus on my real estate photography instead of offering to do every type of photography. It’s a bit scary though, to think that might mean I miss out on some bookings early on.

‘If I’m going to focus on doing real estate photography, do I have to come up with a unique angle? I mean, why are people going to book me unless I offer something different?’ Melissa asked.

‘I know it might seem easy to you,’ she continued ‘but the thought of starting a business is so alien to me — where do you even start?’

‘Well, the easiest answer to both those questions is to realise that you are a business already,’ I replied.

Often when faced with starting a business, it’s the scary ‘unknowns’ that stop a lot of people before they’ve even started: ‘How will I deal with tax?’, ‘Do I need to know a lot of legal stuff?’ — practical things that seem daunting at first from the outside. Coming up, I’ll give you an insight into how the tax system really works, but the truth is that a lot of these ‘procedural’ concerns aren’t the hurdles most people fear.

You are a business already

If you think back to your education and then to your first job, how much of your education prepared you for the actual practical realities of doing your job? If you were lucky your education taught you a skill you could use; in my case, my physiotherapy degree taught me some of what I needed to actually do physiotherapy on patients, but it taught me nothing about how to work day to day in a hospital, how to navigate the bureaucratic aspects of the job, let alone how to start a private practice. Yet, many of my peers did just that, and started their own businesses straight out of university.

So, in what other ways can working a job be compared to being in business?

In a business, you have a product or service you sell; in a job you sell a service as well (you are like a service-based business) — your ‘service’ is your job skills, which you were hired for.

In a business, you have customers; in a job, you have a customer who buys your services too: your boss. You ‘sell’ your customer on your services when you have a job interview. But they’re your only customer — lose your one customer, and you are back to square one!

Importantly, as an employee, your business is not unique: plenty of other people have the same skills or received the same education you did, and yet there was still opportunity for you. You didn’t have to invent something new that no-one else thought of to get your first customer and start making money (to get hired and start getting paid).

It’s the same in any other business: it’s not how original, or clever, or new your business idea or product is that often makes the difference. So don’t fall into the ‘more sophisticated’ trap, and think that you have to wait for inspiration to get started in business. If you find that you are coming up with complicated schemes that are a ‘sure thing’ then you need to take stock — chances are you are trying to avoid failure by coming up with an idea so clever that people will just buy it, and you won’t have to risk getting out there and trying to market your product or sell it.

In fact, it’s actually more risky to rely on being totally new and innovative. Many businesses with really new ideas often go bust trying to convince or educate the public on why their clever idea is necessary in the first place. It’s more important to deliver a quality product than a new one, and it’s better to outcompete others by marketing a ‘standard’ type business better, or running your business better and more efficiently than other people. Seriously, put in place a system for returning customers’ phone calls and you’re ahead of far too many businesses already!

Innovation and creativity are incredibly important but innovation should occur after you are already in the marketplace. To truly offer people more value, you have to know what they actually value, and you can’t figure that out until you start interacting with them. In his book The Lean Start-up, Erick Ries introduced the idea of releasing the ‘minimum viable product’ to market, with the idea that once your product or service is out there, then you can tweak it to what the market wants. People themselves often don’t know what they truly value either, which is why you need to be already charging them money to find out. People pay for what they value. You see what people value by what they do, not what they say.

Which brings me back to the point I made in part II about the lack of feedback trap: without freedom to control both inputs and outputs, you end up less in touch with the market, and therefore less able to respond to changes. Comparing a job to even a small service-based business you’ll realise that in a job you:

• can’t increase your prices (although you can ask for a pay increase)
• can’t decrease your prices (a business may want to offer a discount to stay in business during lean times. Not many people would offer to work a job for less, and even if they did they’d still be at the mercy of a boss who could refuse to raise their salary when business picked up again)
• can be fired at any time — the equivalent of losing 100 per cent of your customers at once
• can’t decrease your workload
• can’t get rid of bad customers, or choose who you work with
• have no warning that your service is becoming obsolete. (In a business if you start to lose some customers you can always test different things and change what you offer)
• can’t change or control your product.

If you view your job as if it were a business, it would be obvious that it doesn’t allow you a lot of freedom. You might think I’m belabouring the point, but it’s important because there are plenty of people who may have a job that is high paying who think, ‘Why would I start a business? I make good money already’ or ‘If I start a business I’d better start big.’

In fact, if you ask most people why they might want to start a business, they’ll tell you ‘to get rich’ or ‘to make more money’.

I believe you should start a business to have more freedom. Remember: freedom leads to wealth.

I believe you should start a business to have more freedom. Remember: freedom leads to wealth.

You want to start a business that frees you first, in other words:

• a business that starts making you money straight away. (This applies to people who want to learn an active investing skill too: create investments that make you money now, not later, and you can leverage that equity you create now into the next investment and so on. Even if you work a job, if you want to actively invest, treat it like a business.)
• a business that can be a service-based business or a product-based business, but it needs to be something you can sell now.

You don’t want to start a business that:

• requires you to go into massive debt, in the hopes of creating the ‘next big thing’.
• traps you in dependence at the mercy of one big customer, or one that depends completely on the whims of one platform.

A business that frees you allows you to make more choices. Freedom to control more means that you can respond to what the market tells you it wants.

Realising that you are a business already — albeit not a very good one, and that starting a business is similar to getting hired and learning on the job — can make taking those first scary steps a lot easier.