The Blog of an Entrepreneur

A good friend of mine is always coming up with ideas for businesses he wants to start, and several times has asked me to get involved either on an advisory role or as one of those frequently mentioned “investment opportunities” :).  Unfortunately for him, some of his ideas sound quite promising, and could perhaps grow to be very successful. So why is that unfortunate?

It is unfortunate because he does absolutely bugger all with his ideas. He mentiones them, bounces off all the walls with excitement, but does nothing until a few weeks later all is forgotten.

Originally I got quite involved with some of his ideas and was considering investing in one, but as I got to know how he  procrastinates and never actually does anything I too lost interest and started to see him as a very high risk investment. My money would end up doing nothing more than paying his wages to do nothing, until the pot ran dry and we would eventually fall out.

The world is full of people who talk a good game, but very few actually make things happen and try their ideas. I almost lost my home a couple of times because I took the risk on my business ideas, my friend will never take that risk. He will forever more be what some call a “wage slave”, despite running his own business he always takes the safe long term contracts with the guaranteed income. There is nothing wrong with this though, an old boss once said to me the world needs worker bee’s just as much as it needs leaders.  What kind of person are you, if you are an Entrepreneur then you are a Do’er, and you will make your business ideas happen at any cost.

It never ceases to amazing me how many “business opportunities” find their way to you when you come in to a bit of money. All sorts of people come out of the woodwork with the next Facebook, MySpace or even UK Business Forums! Only this week I was contacted by someone looking to setup another forum with the plans to sell it for hundreds of thousands, and wanted me to give them all the information they needed to achieve that.

Now I don’t mind helping people, and I will help whenever I can, but what I do not like are people who are looking to make a fast buck by leaching onto someone elses success. Those who know me will know that I devote a lot of time to sharing any knowledge with people who I can clearly see putting in the extra effort themselves, burning the midnight oil, trying their best but simply lack a little experience or expertise in a particular area. I do not like leaches or clinger ons. People who hunt out someone who has something they want, take what they want and dump them.

If you want to make a success of yourself then do it yourself. Seek legitimate help from friends and colleagues, but don’t leach off other peoples success. They will spot you a mile off and you could lose potential mentors or supporters. Also, just because it worked for one person it doesn’t mean it will work for others, how many successful eBay clones do you know of?

I’m very “British”. I know I am and sometimes it’s a serious failing of mine. I’m too polite to complain when the food in the restaurant is not up to scratch, and when our government screws us business owners I bend over and take it right up the backside like thousands of others in the UK.

I’m already annoyed that being a VAT registered business I act as a free debt recovery agent for the HM Revenue & Customs. I collect the VAT duty from my customers on behalf of the government, and then dutifully each quarter I make a nice generous BACS payment to help cover the costs of shipping the publics bank details out to Bin Laden. Then pay tax for the benefit of employing staff, and then my staff pay tax again on their wages, and then I pay corporation tax for making a profit, and then I pay tax on my own earnings, and then I pay tax on my own purchases, and then I pay council tax followed by tax on my car and then tax on my TV, followed by tax on my death and my family will pay tax on any inheritance they get from me. I’m sure I have forgotten about some taxes I pay as an honest citizen, whilst the filthy rich put all their money offshore in hidden bank accounts. The government decides they are far to difficult to chase, so we middle earners take one for England.

Today I wrote a cheque to our lovely HM Revenue & Customs for £245 for the priviledge of being “Supervised” under the up and coming Anti Money Laundering Regulations 2007. You have to love the stupidity of our Government, do they really think that by screwing the good honest business owners in the UK they are going to catch a bunch of terrorists?

So let us get this right, good honest Joe (me) pays more of my hard earned money to robbing bar steward (HMRC) for them to monitor and analyse my business activities just in case Bin Laden decides to use my business to set up a Limited company.  Then just in case he does, and this is where is gets really funny, I have to be skilled enough to identify whether he has managed to defraud the passport office or DVLA to obtain a drivers licence to passport.

That is right campers, we the honest business owners are being penalised and tasked with the duty to compensating for the inadeqacies of our government departments.  Are they going to pay us for this additional workload though, are they hell. Nope instead we have to pay them for the priviledge and cover the additional staffing costs of doing this ourselves, for the good of our country.

Of course, if all us small to medium sized business owners got together to make a stand. Perhaps a small levy on the VAT returns to cover the costs we incure in recovering the VAT payments, what are they going to do? After all, we account for 98.5% of businesses in the UK!

There is a wise old saying that states that helping others is good for the soul. Others know that doing something from the good of your heart gives a warm satisfaction and feeling of well being. This is exactly how I feel after volunteering for Young Enterprise last week, when I spent an entire day teaching 10 year old Year 6 pupils at Kislingbury CEVC Primary School about Import and Exporting, and why all teh countries of the world rely on each other for the trade economy.

The project was called Our World, and it starts by demonstrating where the clothes the  children are wearing have travelled, such as from China and India. Then it moved onto a make believe meal, and the children calculate how far the meal has travelled in total to reach their plates. This part is fascinating to see the amazement on the childrens faces as they begin to realise that a basic Chinese takeaway meal could have travelled some 50,000km before it reaches their door!

The 3rd session is great fun, and is aimed at teaching the children how different countries can work together to produce combined profit, and boost the ecomony of both countries. The room is split into 6x Countries (groups) starting with USA with loads of money and resources but few people through to Bangladesh with little money and resources but lots of people. The children need to identify that if these two countries worked together they can make more produce then work independantly - it almost worked despite myself dropping more hints than I was actually supposed to! Some of the groups did work together and the children all thoroughly enjoyed this part of the day.

After lunch we learnt about the 4P’s of marketing and the children had to design a new product to export to a newly discovered country. They then had to abide by the laws of that country, learn the culture and economy, and design an advertising campaign to suit. The day finished off with each group presenting their new product to the rest of the class.

I thoroughly enjoyed the day and I’m glad to say the children did too. OK you don’t get paid for it, its volunterry, but who cares. I’ve worked with Young Enterprise before with older children aged 15-16 which is just as important, but this was a whole new experience for me. They were older than my children and younger than the age group I have been used to working with so I wasn’t sure how to handle them or what their knowledge level would be. I must admit I was nervous, but didn’t need to be. The children were great, they listened and were keen to learn. The teacher was very supportive, and all in all I recommend every business owner should spend some time on projects like this.

If nothing else, you learn how to teach and that is an important skill to have in life.

I’ve been given the opportunity to get involved in another forum with a business owner who I help mentor occasionally. The guy is John Whitehead and he is a club fitter who runs a company called Strike Right Golf.

It came about during a typical coaching sessions (he was giving me some golf tips and I was giving him some business tips), and was mentioned that he gets a reasonable amount of technical queries from his website but not a lot of business. The conversation moved towards building a community about his website, to get people discussing golf and referring to his website on a daily basis. The end result would be people would be looking at Strike Right Golf to discuss anything golf related.

This then created another problem, would people refer to a club makers website to get independant advice relating to golf? So I took a look at Callaway’s forum and it would appear not. They have a forum and it see’s no more action than .. well something that doesn’t see much action :-). The same goes for so many other business websites who try to set up communities around their core product, it just doesn’t work.

We’ve decided that the best approach is to use a lesson I learnt from UK Business Forums, and set a brand up in it’s own right and promote it in it’s own right. His business will then benefit from being associated with it, be that by sponsoring or just being on hand to give professional advice. I know on UKBF I became known as the only choice for company formation and John will become known as the only choice for golf club fitting on these soon to be announced golf forums.