People who are starting their own business, or starting a side-hustle to their work, often get held up trying to get investment so they can get started. This can delay you for ages, in fact you may never start because it’s too hard to get that investment.
But this because YOU’RE DOING IT IN THE WRONG ORDER!
You should do some selling before you even think of investing money into your business.
I like lending money to people on kiva.org – I like to lend money for capital equipment, maybe a taxi or motorbike or house extension or welding gear. Here are two I sent money to just today:
but the ones I never send money to are the ones where they are running a shop and they want money for more STOCK.
“Money for sweets or makeup to sell in their shop”. I’m thinking “Why haven’t you sold the last lot and made a profit, that you can put back into getting more stock?”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they are lovely people, bound to be hard working, and deserve to succeed, but why do they need to borrow money – if their business is a viable model and they are running it well?
And you don’t even need a lump of money to get started – you can just get five chocolate bars and sell them for the price of seven, and then buy seven and sell them for the price of ten, and then buy ten…. So if your idea is any good it will be self-financing.
You may find you don’t even need to borrow any money at all, which would be great. Debt free, no stress, no interest payments..
But even if you DO decide to expand quickly, maybe open five new shops all with lots of stock, you have at least proved your model, both to yourself and also to potential investors. I’ll be much easier to get the money.
So – don’t procrastinate and wait for an investor, get on with doing some selling, and prove your model.
PS much more information on entrepreneurial side hustle business startups here: https://www.udemy.com/course/side-hustle-business-launch/
