I’m thinking of the type of thing you wished you knew sooner. But if you have other advice, please share!
I’m a couple months (officially) into running a videography business and would love to use this post to share and help each other.
My Advice: I was into videography and doing it as a side hustle for almost a year but kept delaying registering myself as a business. If I could go back, I’d do that sooner.
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Be fair to your customers AND yourself.
Don’t bend over backwards to satisfy customers who cannot be satisfied. Some people are just miserable human beings, and some will gladly bankrupt you if it saves them a nickel. Is their repeat business the kind of business you want?
Don’t be afraid to say NO or to set firm boundaries. Nobody respects a spineless pushover.
I fired 2 customers last week and my crew would follow me into hell because of it.
Register your company and brand in some tax haven. Have a subsidiary “rent” the brand for the amount of income you make, so you have no tax to pay.
Do not do this. It is illegal. But starbucks and other companies do
Donald?
Business owner or not, always salt your pasta water.
But which salt? I use a mixture of Arabian Sea salt and Himalayan rock salt. Some people like using salt sourced from Atlantic Ocean, as it is considered to be saltier than salts of other oceans.
Mono sodium glutamate
I don’t use that in pasta water. I add it when adding sauce, though.
Cover the product in camo, retweet some racists from your official account then just grift your way to retirement.
Don’t get into business with a narcissist. If you don’t figure out they’re a narcissist until after the business has started, bail or kick em out.
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An exit strategy can be who carries on the business after you retire - if you find a niche where people need you, a business can last and grow.
(experiences from small scale agriculture)
Things will always cost more than you think.
Learn about book keeping, even if you don’t start out doing your own book keeping, and do your best to maintain good book keeping practices… the easier you make it for an accountant to look for tax credits, profits, losses, depreciation, and potential write-offs the easier it will be to spend money paying an accounted to make sure the stuff is done correctly. And if/when you start doing your own book keeping and working on summaries if definitely helps to mentally make sense of what’s going on in your business.
If you only have one source for some vital supplies or service, its a very good idea to be on the look out for alternative sources and be ready to find substitutes for those supplies/services.
You get to say “no”. If you only want a small shop that does business with a “X” amount of clients/customer, you are under no obligation to try to provide goods/services to “X + N” amount of clients/customers. So long as you can work sustainably, its not your job or purpose to supply the entire “market”. If there’s more demand than supply, its okay for some other person to start their own thing and serve some of that ample demand. So when people start to complain that you aren’t “big enough” or that “you could have a bigger business” when you aren’t interested, tell them “no.”
Don’t start a business without a plan to handle all the stuff that is not your product.
If you are good at whatever your product is you are not automatically good at building and leading an enterprise (a company), and that may destroy your ambitions… In other words: Even if you have a very promising product you may fail due to completely unrelated organisational hassles because starting a business will drag you into processes that will drain ressources and your brain for completely different stuff, be it financial, legal, hiring and firing staff, customers (customers…), renting, ordering, offering, paper works, ecology and what not.
This shit can and will hurt, in the core meaning of the word, if you are not prepared.
Yep this is the reality. I was a small business owner before when I was young and I was decent at what I did but I had no idea of the realities of running a business. I did 10 years in corporate before starting another one and it’s night and day because I now have way more business context and can breeze through all the side tasks with an understanding of how successful businesses are actually run.
Business is easy to run and even easier to run into the ground. Focusing on not letting bad decisions fuck up everything is your #1 priority.
Most businesses shut down for the stupidest reasons, and it always stems from one small bad move that wasn’t/couldn’t be corrected in time.
I have a few things.
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Know when to fire customers
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Know where the money is coming from. Hope can’t pay bills
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Hire only good people for your core staff
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Establish your own discipline with top priority, even if it means doing things in an inefficient manner. The most important thing is to avoid the lapses in functioning that come from things breaking down or from your own discipline flagging.
As they say “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. To expand on that a little, to keep the bird in your hand you need discipline, and to get the bird in the bush you need daring.
When starting a new business, daring is in abundant supply, and inspiration performs the role of discipline. But in order to succeed, you need to develop discipline before the inspiration wears off.
A machine at 10% efficiency, that’s running, is worth more than a machine at 90% efficiency that isn’t running.
Pay your damn employees
Learn the basics of financial accounting, even if you employ an accountant.
Setting up an LLC or S Corp or whatever kind of entity makes sense for your business is easy to do. Don’t use legal zoom. Be your own registered agent. Just be sure to do your quarterly or annual business filings (depending on industry).
Get a CPA. talk to them about what you spend money on.
The less shits you give trying to “be a real business” the better.
For example a “real” restaurant would have a hostess, perfect china, perfect decor, etc. We joke that we don’t have a “real” restaurant (our friends and neighbors say the same) and it took me a hot minute to realize it’s all about the food & people, if the glasses have water stains, if there is a plate with a small chip it isn’t the end of the world. My background in fine dining still makes me twitch every now and again but I get over it quickly.
Personal anecdote: we opened our restaurant 4 months before covid shut everything down and we found out real quick what was important: keep as consistent as possible, keep yourself & partner happy, know when to shut it down & take a break.
This is our 5th year, it’s just the two of us with one PT server in the summer, we know we aren’t going to be independently wealthy but we make what we need, don’t carry debt, go to the beach every day in the summer (high season), and enjoy our neighbors & friends when they come over to eat (especially during the low season).
