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hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this video I'm going to talk about how to start a business okay welcome back so let's talk about how to start a business really crack into it I'm going to give you the foundation five years ago I started my first business I got into small business online business development and for me that was a huge just like totally expanded my life totally life-changing experience when you start your own business and you go from being an employee to being a self-employed or even an employer if you have some people working for you and it's a really powerful experience it's one of the actually best ways to do personal development so how do you actually go about starting a business if you consider this then you've also probably run against a couple of obstacles and we're going to cover a couple of the key obstacle here key obstacles here that are probably keeping you from really starting that business and actually taking action on not just dreaming about it I think the two biggest obstacles to starting a business is motivation finding the time and then creating the capital so let's cover each of those and then actually I'm going to go in a little bit further and also talk about marketing and a little bit of the finances in the marketing aspect of starting a business which is also very challenging or it can be when you're starting off so first of all let's talk about motivation motivation is important because when you start a business you have nobody else that is driving you but yourself so you really need to start to work on your motivation and start to work on your psychology in fact that is how I got into personal development and that rabbit hole just ultimately led to where I am here now five years from now shooting these videos and studying all this stuff but eventually it started just very simply I wanted more motivation to run my business the key thing when starting a business you got to ask yourself why do you really want this business what is it and I would encourage you to find something within yourself that this business really serves on a deep level this should not be about simply money this should not be simply about freedom from having a boss or freedom from having to go to work and sitting meetings or just sit around at home in your robe and work on your own schedule that's not a sufficient enough motivation to really drive your business your business should be about having impact on the world in some sort of positive way and your business should be about something that you're deeply deeply interested in something that's very meaningful to you do not make the same mistake that I made do not just start a business that earns you money this is a really really big trap because what's going to happen is that even if you start that business and it becomes successful even if you are able to do that and I was the problem is that you're still going to feel hollow inside it's going to be a hollow victory and what's going to happen is that eventually you're gonna have to drop that business and because you're not your soul is not gonna be able to take it you're going to feel like your soul is getting sucked out of you until eventually you're going to come to the hard decision to drop that business that's going to be very painful once you do that you're going to be back to where you are right now which is starting the next business that is now actually going to be living up to your true values to what's meaningful to you so really consider before you start what is meaningful and if you have some idea right now that you think might earn you some money or is a good business opportunity ask yourself is that really what is important is starting an internet affiliate marketing business really something that fulfills my soul is you know selling get-rich-quick products really something it's going to fulfill my soul is starting that that restaurant really something is going to fulfill my soul or is there something more is there something else think about that find something that is really you that will make your life so much easier when you start a business okay next is creating the time starting a business and running a business and especially launching it those first few years take so much of your emotional will or it takes so much of your concentration so much of your energy and quite literally time it takes time it's very difficult to start a successful business even a little business just a one-man shop it's really difficult to start that and to make it big and successful by just putting in a couple of hours every weekend it's really hard and I mean I started I started that way because I was working a nine-to-five job and I couldn't I didn't have the financial luxury to quit my job at that time and just work on my business full-time so my only option was to do this on my nights and on my weekends and it was painful it was hard because I was basically kind of working two jobs as working my nine-to-five and then also killing it at home with a business on my spare time so I didn't really have any other life didn't have a relationship didn't have really any hobbies I was focused on all the time was taken out and that's kind of how it is when you start your business the first few years is that it does suck up a lot of your time and you're probably going to have to be unbalanced in your life those first few years when you start your business because well you only got so much time and you got to prioritize stuff so the the idea here is that you got to really think long term and and ask yourself what is the payoff going to be because I could see for myself clearly five years ago that I could sacrifice the energy that needs to be put out in the time work really hard for a couple of years that will really set me up and open up a lot of opportunities for me in the future and it has the opportunities that have opened up to me and the amount of free time that I'm available now after my business is up and running smoothly is has really transformed the quality of my life in ways that I cannot even relate to you in a single video so it's just it's incredibly powerful and you got it you got to ask yourself is it worth it is it going to be worth it to invest a little bit of time right now extra time work extra hard kind of kill yourself really drain all your energy into this baby that you're creating but then that baby is going to be supporting you it's going to be supporting you for the rest of your life it's going to give you certain dividends and payoffs not just money but more importantly fulfillment freedom to do other things so you have to you have to kind of trick yourself and get yourself motivated in this way and then you have to actually find that time how do you find a time to start a business well like I said if you're working at 9:00 to 5:00 and you have to for financial reasons keep doing that it's not smart to cut off your job and not have any means of support probably will get you into trouble so keep doing that and start finding ways to generate more time weekends holidays take your vacation time off and use it to build your business how about finding a way to maybe downsize the amount of time that you're putting into work maybe you can start to work part time maybe that will work for you maybe you can just start to take one day off of work every week and that will work for you you know see what's possible for you and if all you can do is just work on your weekends then that's all you can do and so just start there it'll take you longer to get it up and running but you know at least at least you're doing something it's better than sitting back and doing nothing don't be a victim of the fact that you don't have the time you have the time you just have to shift your priorities around a little bit okay next point is capital starting a business this is probably one of the biggest obstacles that people have is something that requires capital or at least a lot of businesses do and you might have some idea for some invention that you want to launch a book that you want to write and then market properly a website you want to build some sort of organization you want to create some sort of product you want design and manufactured that you just realize you don't have the capital for you know to design a product manufacture it and then sell it might cost you several million dollars to write that novel that you want to write might require two years of research and and study and then also time just sitting down and writing the novel and so time equates to capital capital might be required to hire some employees in order to do whatever needs to be done for your business capital might be required to run an organization capital might be required to market your service and your product even if you've already got a product and service that really doesn't mean you have a business because you have not marketed yet so the capital question well now is an amazing amazing time in history because we've got the internet and we had a lot of options for how to run businesses and market businesses and totally free or low-cost ways when I started my business I invested about $2,000 cash and that's about all that I invested in it after that everything else came from the profits as a Bennett that the business generated so I took profits from the business channeled it back into the business and use that to build it up and basically that's called bootstrapping so that would be my idea for you is start to bootstrap a lot of ideas can be bootstrapped nowadays so that is kind of an art and science in and of itself and you have to you have to be clever you have to be resourceful when you start when you're a bootstrapping a business you have to start to look for little shortcuts little free avenues of publicity cheap ways to get services or products created or maybe just using your own time as the chief vehicle and the chief source of capital because your own time can be considered free in a sense if you've got it you can invest it in your product or your business and then generate a lot of capital as long as you're investing it smartly so it's finding out where your time can actually generate the most quality product or service that is the key there to bootstrapping a business but also you know if you're not going to be able to bootstrap your business and there's something that you really want but you can't quite bootstrap then what you got to do is you got to start saving up for it saving up for it or look for investors look for ways to convince people of investing in you there's venture capital out there there's programs like Kickstarter or if you've got a good idea you can post it on there maybe people will contribute to your cause there are just angel investors out there you can go find and there's a whole art involved with being able to find angel investors people to invest in your idea so that is out there and you can also just save up money perhaps you just want to work for the next couple of years and you're working on a decent job that's paying you extra more than what you're putting away or spend on yourself and supporting your family for your you know storing some of that away in a nest egg and hopefully if you've got that savings and it's building up then maybe you can calculate that two or three years down the road you can have enough to go start that that brick-and-mortar business maybe that you want to start that actually takes more money and you can't really easily bootstrap a brick-and-mortar business because there's just too much investment upfront so all of those are options and you have to really start to think about what is going to work for you and you're going to have to really deal with this issue of lack of capital all right the next point is once you think about these issues of what you're really interested in where you're going to get the time how are you going to generate the capital the next thing is to really start to do research you just start to do a lot of research start reading about the market segment that you want to go into start reading about the niche start reading about how business works how start reading about marketing and specifically in those areas that you want to apply it in start reading and doing a lot of research start to understand who your potential audience is who your customers will be and start to interview them if you can ideally ask questions try to understand their psychology understand what it is that they really want what are their desires what are their biggest frustrations and biggest problems when you understand that about an audience base your potential customer base that is so so powerful because then you can use that to optimize your product and your service in your marketing to laser target that person to basically find and solve that person's problem as efficiently as possible and when you do that that puts you above the rest of the competition who usually does not do a very good job of understanding the audience's needs and desires and so their product or service doesn't quite match up to it so the best way for you to compete is to do this research because the research is usually not something that requires a lot of money it's just time time investment on you and critical thinking skills do the research understand your audience survey them question them really get to know them and then craft something unique that really fits what they want it's exactly what they want targets them so that they are really interested in behind that product what is critical when you're starting a business is to really understand what is going to sell marketability especially when you're bootstrapping because when you're bootstrapping you basically need the business to start to pay for itself as soon as possible and for that to happen you really need to make sure that you've got something that people are willing to buy you don't have years to sit and wait for the product to catch on you don't have years to sit and wait and to let your huge advertising budget which some of these you know multinational global corporations have like Microsoft or Google or Apple you don't have all this marketing power and all these this huge bankroll to to just sit and wait for a product to become successful over a long period of time when you're bootstrap you need something to be a hit right off the bat and to do that you need to start to really understand your audience and create something that they're going to really really love and one of the keys to doing that is to do an iterative type of business model where you are you're really going out there and you're not even creating a full-fledged product or service you're just testing the waters and you're just seeing what could potentially work and you're doing a little little proofs of concept so if you've got if you've got some sort of website that you want to create you put that website up and you just see our people interested in it you put up the most bare-bones version of that website you don't build it this gigantic ginormous project that takes you three years to create because that's too much investment of time and capital and that might fail what you do is you create something small something within a month you put it out there you just see there's even one or two people like it just test out the waters the same thing with any part of business you got to go out there and you got to get a test case a proof of concept with feedback that tells you that it's working and that this is something that people are interested in and will pay money for as soon as possible I think this is the biggest pitfall with starting a business is just saying that I'm all in and I don't care what the market says going in they're not paying attention to the market spending all your time and investment creating this beautiful product dispute aful service and then finding out that the market doesn't want it or it doesn't rate resonate with the market or that marketing it would would be more than your resources right now allow for so this is a big big big pitfall if you're starting a business I think the biggest takeaway is to go out there and start doing these little tests well you'll also learn in doing these little tests is you'll start to learn about the market this is actually the best way to do research is to throw stuff out there and see is it hitting where is it not hitting where is it not working then polishing it up and then throwing something else out of the market and see how is that resonating how is that hitting and then polishing up again and then do another run where you're gonna find is that this process of trial and error is going to lead to your perfect niche and that perfect niche is where you going to get your success your results and your business is going to skyrocket it's going to be profitable and everything's going to go well for you but right now you're still in the early phases and you got to start doing a little bit of this research doing a little bit of this testing and you can start to do that just on your time off on the weekends little tests here and there to start to see which direction you want your business to go in all right so that is how to start a business a lot more ideas that I can throw out here but this is just like an introductory segment this is Leo I'm going to be signing off post me your comments I love to have feedback from you guys because I use it to improve my videos also it gives me ideas for new videos to shoot when you ask me different questions and I find something interesting there like this share this subscribe to my newsletter at actualised I work where you get some exclusive bonuses a nineteen part video series for signing up chance to win some free coaching for me every month and really the 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