It’s a very good point. This same survey also had the remarkable statistic that 61% of people say that one of the good things about working for yourself is that you can start the work day in your pyjamas. Is that an issue? While the flexibility is fantastic, people can underestimate the amount of sheer work that needs to go into getting your business off the ground.
Yes absolutely, I think people underestimate the work and I think part of what goes wrong is that people don’t value their own time. So they go “I could work 10 hours a day, seven days a week, there’s 70 hours and those hours are free and I can be chugging away at stuff all the time”. And because of that, because there is nobody holding you accountable for what they are actually doing in that time, what I find is that people starting businesses go off on amazing sorts of rabbit warrens and get very sucked into things that aren’t adding any value to the business. But they feel that because they are working on something therefore it must come to something.
A small example of that is small businesses getting very, very excited on Twitter and twittering things for hours a day but actually not doing it with a plan of how is it actually helping the business.
So a start-up entrepreneur can feel that it’s great, I can start the day anytime, I can do all this in my pyjamas, I’ve got all this freedom. But actually because they’re not valuing their hours, they’re not saying each hour I’m working is worth $200, would I spend $200 doing this? No, and therefore I shouldn’t be doing it. And that’s a very key thing.
Yes, it’s getting back to the numbers.
I can speak from experience. It’s lovely when you first start your business and you think “oh wow, I can just float around at home and do whatever I want” but I think you somehow actually need to have somebody, either have somebody else or some system in place to make you think about where you’re spending your time. It isn’t an inexhaustible supply and things take so much longer than you think they’re going to, so in fact you have to be more focused than less focused.
Now you’ve started a couple of businesses in the last few years since leaving the corporate world. How’ve you found the experience? You’re a highly experienced corporate adviser, that makes it nice and easy to start a business [laughs].
I’ve absolutely had a magnificent time and I really, really enjoyed it and I was so ready to do it.
Probably with my accounting background I erred slightly on the side of caution and interestingly when you say about people taking a part-time role, my last year as a partner at Deloitte, I actually had a part-time role there, I had two days a week where I went off and did my own business stuff and I had a very easy transition which was fantastic for me. And I suppose my business is about advising businesses around setting up and running businesses, I did have a bit of an advantage with all the things I thought about.
But the same old things seemed to take me so much longer to do than I thought they would. I fell into the trap of doing a lot of things which didn’t add any value at all but were great fun. I got sucked into a lot of things. People would often ask me to come and meet for coffee, let’s do this, let’s do that. And I was sort of a little bit like, you never know where this might go. And I had to sort of stop that and say “right, let’s be a little bit more strategic about this and I can’t fill my days just meeting people, there’s got to be a purpose to this”.
But on the flipside, what I found was that this wonderful network of people with small and medium sized businesses were very happy to help each other. That was just amazing. Comparing that to the corporate world, where I think people are really a little bit suspicious of other people. There is something which is less helpful in the corporate world. And I just found that such a huge surprise and really rewarding.
I know you’ve started a few brands or a few separate businesses. Was that a deliberate strategy or was that something that sort of happened?
That’s very interesting because my advice to anybody would be start one business, have one brand because it makes it all a lot easier. So I did the opposite of what I advise people. The challenge for me was that I operate in two very distinct markets.
I do work with medium sized businesses which are growing and looking at profitable growth, which is quite grown-up stuff. And then I have this passion, particularly around women starting very small businesses, the sort of businesses that people do from home which actually rarely make any money because they don’t know how to do it, but where I can see that there are a few things they could do differently and they could actually start making money.
Because those two markets are very different I felt that if I brand them under one organisation, the bigger businesses would look at what I’m doing around the very small businesses and think “oh that’s too small Mickey Mouse stuff.”
And if it was all around the bigger businesses, then the smaller businesses who actually need a lot of nurturing, support and confidence building would think “oh no, that’s not for me”.
You can actually deliver the same sort of information but the markets are so different so I decided to do it separately. I really wouldn’t advise people to do it that way, it’s a big challenge and I’ve wrestled with it actually. There I am trying to market and build two different things, but I did make a little pros and cons list and did decide that it was the right thing to do. They’re different styles of business. One’s a very internet based business and one’s a very in person, physical type business. So they’re different but you’re splitting yourself in half and that’s the difficult thing, you’ve got even less time.
James was the editor and publisher of SmartCompany and LeadingCompany for five years. He is now the Australian Financial Review‘s companies & markets editor, and a former BRW editor.
