Apprentice star’s 6 tips when starting a business
Are there things about business you wish you had learned beforehand? At each job we have, we probably all learn new things every week about the world about business, clients and customers and how the fast industries and roles can change.
Nick Holzherr, who stared on The Apprentice and became a finalist back in 2012, is now a successful entrepreneur with virtual cookbook platform Whisk. But even with Lord Sugar’s help four years ago, there are things that Nick wish he had known years ago. The 30-year-old, who set Whisk up following his stint on the BBC One show, revealed to TheBusinessDesk.com six tips when starting a company.
1. When you’re starting out, focus on a concept that is relatively simple and focus on an understandable and clear concept. One of the biggest mistakes I see is people massively over-complicating it at the beginning. Imagine that you’re about to climb Everest, your objective is to reach base camp, not the peak. The idea is that you do everything in stages. If you try and build something massive right at the start, you’ll never achieve it. If you get to a simple version of what you want to do first, you’ll have a much better chance of going from base camp to the peak.
2. The team you work with is incredibly important. Make sure you hire people that are smart and that you love to work with. You need to understand them and they need to understand you. High staff turnover or having the wrong people can kill your business very quickly. Don’t waste your money on people who are not right for the business, because you will quickly go bust.
3. Make sure you have a revenue model which means you will be able to make money early on. One of the biggest mistakes that I see are people thinking that when they reach a certain size, they will make loads of money, but they never get to that size or make money along the way. It is important to make money along the way of your journey rather than waiting for the business to be a huge success.
4. Start as early as you can rather than over planning and overthinking things. Stop writing business models all the time and selling and pitching, instead just start the business and start building what you want to build so that you can show the real business to real customers and clients as early as possible so you start to get feedback from them.
5. Get the design of your company branding really slick, everything from the website, graphics to even your networking. People buy into your brand, and they won’t want to do so if it doesn’t look good. It is amazing what you can do with some good design, it makes people believe and trust your brand.
6. Find great mentors. It doesn’t matter how experienced you think you are, having an outside opinion and talking with people who are more experienced than you will help massively in the long run. Find someone who has succeeded and who has done it before, not someone who thinks they know they can do it. If you want to scale a company, don’t go to an accountant, although they know theoretically how to do it, they haven’t done it themselves. Go to someone who has scaled their business before and has seen how it works.
