Room to Grow YouWhen is the right time to start your business?
It’s no surprise that the answer is never and right now, depending on your motivation.
With that said, you’ll never be more motivated than you are right now.
Unless you are one of those who won’t even begin the process if all the boxes aren’t ticked.
From a financial standpoint, ideally, you would have saved enough for at least 6 months’ worth of house expenses, at least 3 more months for contingencies (car breaks down when you need them the most, leaky roof type of situations), and would have calculated in at least for 6 month’s worth of operating costs for your business (if applicable) before you start earning.
As I said this is the most opportune time to start, as you won’t feel the pressure to deliver success immediately and can take your time.
However, the reality is that you will probably be hustling your day job and trying to fit in your business venture in between taking care of the kids and social needs.
Which doesn’t leave a lot of available hours left does it?
This means you’ll have to make a sacrifice now and then to be able to lift the business from the ground up.
This applies to people who know what their business will be specialising in.
Suppose you are still rummaging around, trying to figure out what that is for you. If that is the case, I suggest you look at all the options and do some research as to what can be combined at present with the amount of free time you have.
Then take a moment to pause, reflect and go with whatever your personality and personal aspirations are most in sync with.
I’m not sure what’s trickier, deciding what you’re going to pursue or when you would start it.
The timing might never be right, but if we keep waiting for that day job to be less stressful, or the kids less demanding than now, it’s never going to come.
“Let us choose for ourselves our path in life, and let us try to strew that path with flowers.” — Émilie du Châtelet, Natural Philosopher and Mathematician 1
So here’s a checklist of what you need in order to start your online business:
1.Get motivated – find whatever works, write down a list of everything bothering you, and start looking for answers to what kind of online business could solve this situation for you. For a comprehensive guide to starting your business, you can check out this workbook which takes you through the whole process of coming up with an idea to executing it and most importantly, teaches you how to constantly use your mantra to stay motivated even when things get really challenging.
Here’s a Pinterest profile I always look forward to getting new motivational pins from.
2. Create your business idea, this might even preclude the first point as you might have already had some thoughts on your strengths, weaknesses, passions, and skills to come up with an idea of what you would be most comfortable doing in the future. It’s no use starting your business if you’re not completely committed to the idea. Run it past your friends and family, they might even have a viewpoint of the idea that you haven’t thought about. Be prepared for them to shoot the idea down as well though! But if you’re determined to realize it, take the criticism, view it as constructive, and move forward with the realization. Some ideas for starting an online business are:
- These best small business ideas for women are a perfect list for the undecided;
- they contain lots of good ideas, of which I’ve tried Freelance writing and virtual assistance, it’s a good idea to start with smaller freelance tasks if you have no idea where to start, the experience and insight from some of them might show you the way.
3. Perform research before starting, you don’t want to start without a way to get paid or not have the resources or skills needed to get the job done. My journey started 2 months prior, just reading up on anything I could find. I created a list first of almost 30 thighs that I was interested in, slowly dwindling it down to 3. The reason is that when you start researching and expanding on your idea you will get a sense of just how much time and energy each will take from you.
4. Choose only 1 idea to get started. Believe me, if you start with 3 as I did, your energy will be dispersed and you won’t be committing to anything to get any value out of it. If you can’t choose 1, then at least broaden your task list progressively. Create smaller projects that you can realize quickly so you don’t feel overwhelmed with the amount of information you’ve accumulated.
5. Know your strengths and admit that you don’t have the time or skills for a certain task related to your idea. Find help, ask your friends for assistance if they have the skills or experience, and trust me, they will come to your aid for this cause. All your friends probably want the same thing, to live off of an independent income, better yet, if it’s passive so don’t be afraid to ask, they will support you.
6. Just start already :)! There’s no better time than now! You will still have to continuously do your research so you will never be fully prepared for the real-life situations that arise. The sooner you get started the sooner you will fail and through trial and error, you will learn the best.
There you have it; if you’re still in the hesitation phase I urge you to just roll up your sleeves, get some coffee after everyone goes to sleep if there’s no time before that during the day, and have confidence that you will succeed 🙂
