by Lisa Cybaniak
So you’re thinking about starting up a business, whether it’s leaving the corporate world in favour for entrepreneurship, or selling your business to start something new, and you’re consumed with trying to figure out what you want to invest your time and money in for your business venture.
Today we’re talking about how to start a business in unfamiliar territory. Perhaps it’s that in order to offer what you want to offer, you need to learn about many other components that currently escape you. Or perhaps you are driven to offer something that you have no experience in at all.
Vicki Wilkes is a Research Metallurgist and Technical Sales Engineer who owned a ran a business with her husband, Darren, designing, building and supporting bespoke materials testing machines around the world.
Meet Vicki Wilkes
One day, Vicki and her husband realised they were spending all their time doing the business instead of growing it. That was the moment they decided to sell it and move on. But to what?
After much discussion, they decided to completely change gears and open a live entertainment venue and bar called Red By Night, on The Waterfont in Brierley Hill. And here’s the really cool part – neither had any experience with playing music or running a bar!
If you’re wondering the same as me: How in the world to two engineers get into the live entertainment business, and make it succeed when they have no past experience in the industry, then you’re in luck because that’s exactly what we’re going to cover today! Vicki is sharing her top tips today on how to start your business, even when it’s in unfamiliar territory.
So, let’s dive right in!
Start a business you’re passionate about
The first tip may seem obvious, but passion can fuel you through anything. And if you’re passionate about it, whether it’s how you’re helping people or the work itself, or anything in between, passion is crucial.
Vicki and her husband Darren had absolutely no experience with running a bar or live entertainment venue, but being passionate about it made them each dig deep to understand their own skill sets and figure out how they can apply within this business.
What makes you tick?
By figuring out what makes you tick, as in gives you all the positive feels, you can begin narrowing down what you’d like to do on a day-to-day basis. Vicki explains that there can be a very fine line between what makes you tick and what stresses you out. Just because you have a lot of skills that you use each day in your current role, doesn’t mean they are all skills you’d like to build upon in your new one.
Get really honest with yourself here as you look at starting a business. What could you do more of in your day and feel great, and what would you rather ditch?
Ask for help
This is such a universal tip, isn’t it? There aren’t many times when this advice wouldn’t apply. Although Vicki and her husband are both engineers, they needed a lot of help with many different aspects of starting a business of this nature.
So, they asked! Whether it was contacting the council, other businesses in the area, friends and family, colleagues, you name them, they asked.
As Vicki says, you don’t know what you don’t know. And that’s so true, isn’t it? Rather than waiting to find out that there is something major you don’t know about in this new business, start asking others, even if it’s just for their opinion.
Call in the experts!
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel here, especially when you’re starting a business. Even when you are an absolute expert in the field you’re considering starting a business in, there will always be aspects to running that business that you are not an expert in.
For Vicki, she already knew a great deal about the renovation process from being an engineer, but she doesn’t know about marketing and social media. So…. Find people who can do this for you. Yep, I’m talking about outsourcing.
The first thing Vicki did was hire a fantastic bar manager who knows exactly what is needed to make a great bar, from the layout and design, to offerings.
Be smart in your hires
Okay, any business wants to be smart when hiring out roles, including outsourcing. What we’re talking about here is ensuring that who you have working for you has different opinions from you and a different way of looking at things. That’s because they will play into your weaknesses and strengths.
You want them to offer another way of looking at things; to see potential problems that you don’t; and potential solutions that haven’t occurred to you.
Be adaptable
Let’s face it, when starting a business, you’re going to have to learn some things as you go. It’s vital that you remain adaptable in this process. You might have an amazing idea for a business, or an offer within your business, and that’s awesome. Just make sure you’re open to new ideas along the way.
Vicki’s live entertainment venue, Red by Night has been open for 4 months at the time of this recording, and already someone suggested including Salsa lessons. Vicki jumped at the chance!
She hadn’t thought of that on her own, so someone else’s suggestion could’ve lead her to simply dismiss it as she focused on the live entertainment aspect of her business.
But she didn’t let that happen. Instead, she did a risk assessment, realised that if it was a flop it wouldn’t bankrupt them. Rather, it would be an opportunity to learn and grow. And, if she decided to not give it a try, with the minimal risk she calculated, would she regret not taking the chance?
More from this episode
Vicki and I talk about so much more in this episode, like her major take-away’s from starting a business she knew nothing about, the importance of communication, the need to take your ego out of it so you can see opinions as opinions rather than criticism, how loneliness can creep in when you work for yourself, and the underlying theme of successful people.
Press play on the episode above – you don’t want to miss this!
Check out Red by Night on their website, and follow Vicki/Red by Night on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
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Voice over credit: Shari Vandermolen. Shari is offering a free download of one of her songs to the fans of the Life Like You Mean It podcast! Just visit www.GiftFromShari.com and tell her where to send it. Shari’s debut album is available for streaming on all the major platforms including Spotify and iTunes.
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