Rachel Bridge - How To Start a Business without Any Money

CONTENTS

About the Author

Rachel Bridge is the former Enterprise Editor at the Sunday Times where she wrote about entrepreneurs and small business. She has an MA in Economics from Cambridge University. She has written four previous books about entrepreneurs: How I Made It, My Big Idea, You Can Do It Too and How to Make a Million Before Lunch.

About the Book

Do you dream of starting your own business but worry that you dont have the funds to make it happen?

What if you could set up a venture with nothing but a good idea and the determination to make it work?

Using dozens of real-life examples from successful entrepreneurs, this book will show you how to begin and grow a business without vast sums of money. Learn how to choose an idea that will make money fast. Find out how to promote your business for free and discover how to solve the problems of premises, stock, and getting the best talent on board on a shoestring budget. And join Rachel on her journey as she embarks on her own fund-free business venture and records her experiences throughout the book.

You really can start a business without any money. This is your essential guide to making it happen.

For Jack and Harry

INTRODUCTION

The inspiration for writing this book came from a workshop I held for budding entrepreneurs in early 2011. I began running occasional workshops on how to start a business because so many people got in touch after reading my last book, How to Make a Million Before Lunch (2010), asking for my thoughts and advice on their money-making ideas.

Anyway, I arrived at this workshop with a long list of topics to talk about, but it soon became clear that all anyone really wanted to talk about was how to get their hands on some money to start their business. The banks werent interested in lending to people without a track record in running a venture, and it was not easy to borrow money from friends and family in such an uncertain economic climate with so many jobs and pensions under threat. There was little appetite either for the traditional funding routes of remortgaging the family home or racking up huge debts on credit cards, even assuming both were still options. With housing prices falling, credit card interest rates so high and fewer opportunities to transfer money from one credit card to another offering a zero per cent transfer deal another regular entrepreneur standby all the old options seemed to have become too risky and unappetising.

But as we talked about the difficulty of finding funding for a start-up business, it suddenly struck me that, actually, we were having entirely the wrong conversation. We shouldnt be talking about how and where to get funding, we should be talking about how to start a business without needing funding in the first place. Surely that would be a lot more useful?

Just think about it for a minute. If you didnt actually need to borrow money to get your business off the ground whether from the bank, or from your family, or elsewhere then how much simpler and less daunting the whole process would be. You wouldnt have the burden of a huge debt hanging over you from day one, you wouldnt need to make loan repayments every month plus interest and charges and you wouldnt need to worry about how and whether you were actually going to be able to do that. Or worry about whether the bank would suddenly decide to pull the plug on your venture.

And without the need for a loan from your family and friends you could stop worrying about what would happen if you lost all their money and wrecked their lives.

Well, of course that all sounds lovely. Who wouldnt want to do that? The big question is whether it can really be done. The answer is yes, it can, and this book will show you how.

Certainly, some businesses do need a lot of money to start up. Opening a shop, building a factory and drilling for oil, to name just three. Some businesses start off in debt because they have had to pay for everything upfront and their customers take forever to pay them, so they are always effectively running to catch up. And some businesses take forever to build up to sufficient critical mass and get to a point at which they can at last begin to make money.

But others dont.

So why not actively seek out those ventures which dont have big upfront costs, which dont need lots of money to run, and which start making money from day one because customers pay them in advance? Why not simply stack all the odds in your favour?

This approach does require a bit of radical thinking. You may need to start smaller than you had imagined, for instance. Or rethink the type of product or service you are selling, and how you sell it. But the reward will be that you actually get to start a business of your own, rather than endlessly dreaming about it. And you get to do it in a much less scary way, without the financial risk and the sleepless nights.

Which means this book is for budding entrepreneurs of all ages and stages it is for students trying to find a way to fund their way through college and create a job for themselves at the end; it is for retired people who have discovered that their pension pot has shrunk while they were not looking; and it is for people whose jobs are at risk, or who have lost their job, or who are at home trying to juggle making money with bringing up children. And it is for anyone who has ever dreamed of starting a business but thought, no, I cant afford to do it.

Even better, I am not just going to tell you how others did it I am going to tell you how I did it myself. Throughout this book you will be able to follow the progress of my own start-up, Entrepreneur Things, which sells inspiring products for entrepreneurs. It cost next to nothing to get off the ground and you can check it out for yourself at Entrepreneurthings.com. Its a teeny tiny business at the moment and still very much a work in progress, but it means that as well as telling you about how other people did it, I will also tell you how I did it how I am doing it and show you step by step just how easy it is to get started. And how to avoid the pitfalls, because, of course, I experienced some of them, too. After all, it wouldnt be entrepreneurship if it wasnt a roller-coaster ride.

There is an enduring myth that you need a lot of money to start a business. That it is a route open only to those with means, or access to them. But, really, you dont. You just need to choose wisely, to make the most of new technology and new ways of communicating, and above all to remember that for every decision you make there are two paths to choose between the one which costs money and the one which doesnt.

I recently had a meeting with someone I wanted to stay in touch with, but when he offered me his business card I didnt have one of my own to give him. So while we were getting ready to leave I simply typed his email address into my BlackBerry and sent him an instant email saying hello and including my phone number and website address. A million times better than handing over a business card which he will instantly lose because my details are now sitting in his email inbox and he will always be able to search for them . He sent a short email back a few hours later and with that we were linked forever in cyberspace. It was completely free, too.

So the message of this book is, if you really want to start a business, dont let lack of money put you off. Just do it anyway. Yes, you could wait for the good economic times to roll again any time soon, but there are no guarantees that will happen and anyway by then the opportunity may have been lost forever. Dont let external factors stop you acknowledge them, adapt and jump right in. You dont need money to get going, you just need to adopt the right attitude and think about things in a slightly different way.