Boss It

Control Your Time, Your Income and Your Life

Carl Reader

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789666427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Imprenditoria
• Index: Business

WINNER: Independent Press Awards 2021 - Business: Entrepreneurship & Small Business
HIGHLY COMMENDED: Business Book Awards 2021 - Start up/Scale up Do you dream of ditching the day job, doing your own thing and being your own boss? Are you ready to Boss It? In this invigorating and highly practical book, serial entrepreneur Carl Reader provides exactly the fire and guidance you need to get started. Designed to cut through the business jargon, this handy guide will take you through everything you need to establish and run your own business - from the mindset it takes to turn a dream into a plan, to the need-to-know practical stuff for running and growing a business. Featuring case studies, templates and exercises to help you put what you read into action, and turn that dream into a reality, this motivational book will enable you to be your own boss, to take control of your income, your time and your life... and Boss It.

Part One

Dream it

01

Why should you be your own boss?

In this chapter you will:

• find out the realities of running a business;
• understand why people start, and stay, in business;
• find out about the difference between a business and self-employment;
• find out about the different types of business owner.

Before you even start thinking about whether you should be your own boss, you need to consider why you would want to be your own boss. What is it that made you pick up this book? Is it the culmination of a lifelong dream, or a moment inspired by a motivational quote on social media? Are you thinking about a bigger vision that you have, or just trying to escape the rat race of employment? We all have different triggers, and understanding what has driven us to this point can prove extremely helpful when things don’t go to plan.

I hate to put a dampener on things, particularly this early in the book, but there are a few realities of running a business which don’t tend to get shared publicly. I didn’t promise this journey would be easy! Let’s just mull over these first.

The realities of running a business

Reality check 1: You won’t escape the rat race

I hate to say it, but it’s true. Often, when we are stuck in a mundane day job, we can look at business owners with some level of envy. Perhaps it’s the flexible schedules, the lack of a boss, or a preconceived idea of the pots of money that most business owners are sat on.

These thoughts might make great daydreams, but the reality is that almost all self-employed individuals end up in a rat race of their own, and many business owners do too (we’ll cover the differences between the two later, as this will be a recurring theme during the book). Before diving into a new venture blindly, it’s important to understand that business is hard work, and in the early days there’s likely to be little financial reward.

One of the harsh realities of starting a business is that there is no such thing as a ‘market rate’ for your time as a business owner. Nor is there even the concept of a ‘minimum wage’. You might look at self-employed plumbers charging £80 per hour, but the reality is that they have to spend many unbilled hours marketing their business, travelling between jobs, doing their admin, or simply waiting for more work to come in. In the early days, you have to expect that there will be an investment of both money and unpaid work to build a business.

Reality check 2: Things won’t go to plan

Again, this is another sign that it’s not easy. I’d love to say that I’ve seen a business hit its projections perfectly, but it never happens. In fact, I can almost certainly say that you won’t hit your financial and operational projections exactly. In all likelihood, you’ll have more chance of winning the lottery than getting every figure and ratio exactly right before you’ve started. There are too many unknowns in the future; trying to be penny-perfect in your projections is unrealistic.

In my experience, that means that you will be more likely to be optimistic in your plans rather than pessimistic. You are more likely to predict that you will have more customers, with a higher average spend, and better profit margins. And you are more likely to forget some of the costs of your business in your forecasts. I haven’t run a statistical analysis on all of the businesses I have advised to verify this fact – but I also can’t remember a single business that has massively outperformed its wildest expectations.

There’s a simple reason for this. When any of us look at a new venture, we look at it optimistically; if we weren’t being optimistic, we probably wouldn’t do it! Think about it logically – why would you leave a stable, secure job to do something that won’t work? Leaving behind the comfort of a guaranteed monthly income, surrounded by work colleagues and the luxury of weekends is a tough step, and most of us wouldn’t ditch it without dreaming of something far better.

All that said, optimism isn’t a reason to not go ahead with building a business. Far from it. In fact, you need to embrace any optimism that you have, as you will need it during the highs and lows of starting and growing a business. It is also a vital asset during your vision-setting and in the early days of running the business. Just make sure that you keep your optimism in check when preparing your projections and plans for the business.

Reality check 3: You will be tested beyond your comfort zone

Being your own boss seems easy. You can choose when you want to come into work, park right next to the door and have assistants to do everything from your typing through to organizing your next corporate entertaining trip. And your employees will do the ‘real’ work as well, won’t they?!

These thoughts are commonplace in those with an employee mindset. But the reality of doing your own thing is actually very different. In the early days you will be everything, doing every single job. You’ll be the managing director, the typist and the coffee server. You’ll most probably be the cleaner as well! You will be doing things that you don’t want to do, and things that you don’t know how to do.

Very early on in the business journey, you’ll have a realization of exactly how much you don’t know. And it’s almost certainly quite a lot! While you might have experience in some of the vital areas – such as sales perhaps, or finance – you will soon find that the reality of juggling your sales skills with the analytical detail needed from a finance director, while also managing an outsourced team of developers and searching for suitable suppliers, is a tough ask.

You will also find that the emotional rollercoaster will be far more thrilling than anything that you would have encountered in employment. If the cash flow projections for the month look a little tight, it’s not someone else’s problem – it’s yours. In the early days, you will own every single win and loss in the business, and the emotion around each will be magnified. There will be times that will be stressful beyond imagination, and other times where you couldn’t imagine life being any different. Dealing with these ups and downs in business is one of the main strengths in most business owners that continue beyond the first couple of years.

Reality check 4: You will work longer, and harder, than you ever did for a boss

There is a great phrase that I think sums up most self-employed people:

You go from working for a jerk to working for a maniac.

Those of you who have already made the leap into self-employment are probably reading the above with a wry smile. The stresses of not hitting your initial targets, and learning on the job, often force you to work extremely unsociable hours in order to get by. I once heard that the best thing about being self-employed is that you can choose exactly which 18 hours per day you want to work.

As your business grows, you will probably find that your level of input grows as well, until you reach the point at which you have a truly scalable business with a management and leadership team. The reality, however, is that only a very small percentage of businesses ever reach the size needed to afford a team capable of releasing the business owner from the day-to-day grind. In fact, only 4 per cent of UK businesses ever reach £1 million turnover, and of those, only 10 per cent ever reach £10 million turnover.¹ Even in businesses turning over £10 million per year, I still find business owners slaving away as an integral part of the team.

There are ways to scale effectively and build a business that is not reliant on you: I wouldn’t have had the time and freedom to write this book if that wasn’t the case. But there are many sacrifices, not least financial, that need to be made to achieve that. In the last section of this book, we’ll look at how to build a truly scalable business, if that’s what you’re after.

Reality check 5: You and your business will become intertwined

That’s right. You know those weird folk who are always checking emails and making business calls while on holiday? They usually aren’t doing it for someone else.

A strange thing happens when you run your own business: you find that your personal world and your work world are no longer separate. Business acquaintances become personal friends, and vice versa. Weekends become weekdays, and weekdays become weekends. Work–life balance often becomes a lot harder to achieve; work and life may even slowly become one and the same.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t have downtime from the business. In fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Every business owner needs to take time out to recharge their batteries, and to reassess what they are doing and why they are doing it. Certainly in the early days of running a business, though, you will find that separation between your personal and business life becomes harder and harder.

If you’re going into business, you need to come to terms with the fact that you’ll never again clock off at 5pm on a Friday.

A moment to reflect

Do these reality checks put you off? If not, think next about the impact that running a business might have on your family, or other dependants. It’s important not to be deluded about the realities of building a business.

So why should you be your own boss?

If you’re still with me, you’ve shown the first sign of resilience that a business owner needs! You may also be wondering why ...

Table of contents

• Who this book is dedicated to...
• About the author
• Preface
• The world has turned on its head...
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Be your own boss
• Part One Dream it
• 01 Why should you be your own boss?
• 02 The difference between success and failure
• 03 How to create a business idea
• Part Two Plan it
• 04 From dreaming to planning
• 05 Raising funds
• 06 How to make the important first step
• Part Three Do it
• 07 Building your systems and processes
• 08 Finding your customers and marketing
• 09 Moving towards the bigger picture: Scaling your business
• Part Four Scale it
• 10 An introduction to scaling
• 11 Scaling 101 – The growth model
• 12 Scaling 101 – The funding model
• 13 Scaling 101 – The staffing model
• 14 Scaling 101 – The leadership model
• 15 Final words of advice
• Notes
• Index