Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
Is it the Right Time to Be Starting a Business with Jo Morisson
Show Notes
Today’s guest is Jo Morrison from Go Go Mojo Coaching. Jo is a Career Growth Specialist and Business Founder Coach. Prior to launching her business Jo was a Innovation and Entrepreneurship Director at INCUBATE the program for early stage founders at the University of Sydney and she coached innovation within corporate businesses. Jo offers practical coaching and Mojo Action Plans to help navigate your career or launch your business.
Write Down Your Ideas
You can really start by getting some ideas down on a piece of paper. There can be a real over-complication with business planning. In the first early stages, it’s really about working out whether this is something that you love, and you would like to look to have a commercial element to it. Whether it’s a hobby and it is just something you love and you want to focus on that. Get some thoughts down on a piece of paper about where you would see it going, what you think the potential opportunities are. Form of a mind map rather than a bland boring business plan that you might submit to a bank to try and get finance for example.
There’s something quite friendly about paper when compared with a computer screen. Try and use a bit of colour and creativity so you’re not feeling like you have to be trapped into black and white to really look at what your plan might be for your future.
Make Categories But Don’t Limit Yourself
You can also categorise things. Thinking about what activities you would like to do day-to-day, what would you like to be doing more of in your day-to-day. Then maybe you can go into more things like how would I make money, how can I test to see if people will pay for this product or service? There’s a number of tests you can run before you even get to the point where you decide if this is something you want to move forward with.
A lot of times, the business is great. It’s an absolutely fabulous idea. Your friends and family say, “Oh yeah, yeah, that’s terrific.” But would they actually put their dollars down? And that’s one point to remember that your friends and family are generally not your audience. Even though it’s good to talk to them about it and get a few ideas, you really do need to go to your peer group and to the people that will be your actual audience, your potential customers.
Don't Be Put Off By Feedback
It’s also important not to be put off by people saying they wouldn’t necessarily buy it because that’s just, that’s feedback, right? That’s not necessarily a shut down and an absolute no. That’s a maybe you need to work on this idea a little bit further or maybe you need to think a little bit laterally and add another idea to it. What could you combine or change? Could you run it in a different format? Your business might be entirely online. Jo generally doesn’t meet with clients face-to-face. She coaches them entirely over the phone. In terms of the current job market and what’s happening out there with people working from home, that’s a space that people used to think was weird. When you’re thinking about your business idea, don’t just look at what’s happening right now, think about where society is going to go in the next six, 12, 24 months and even longer like five years.
Consider A Business Partner
There’s something about working with a co-founder or having founding a business with another person. Getting together and really mapping out what you both might want out of that business in the longer term can really avoid a lot of problems later on. Quite a few founders who started off and it’s all been a happy families have realised that as they’ve got further in, they really want different things out of life. Making sure that your life path is not necessarily the same as your co-founder or your business partner, but that you’ve at least had the conversation of where do we see this business going? How do we want to live our lives? Do we want to work business hours? Does one of us have a lot of family responsibilities outside of hours? And that real open dialogue can make sure that you avoid some of those problems later on when things maybe aren’t going quite so well.
It really needs to be a values match too. If your values are quite different to the person that you’re thinking of going into business with, think about that as a long-term thing. Is that going to work for you or is that a value that you just can’t move forward? At the beginning stages, sometimes you have to just step back a little, be a bit more analytical. They might be your best friend, they might be your best co-worker, but is this somebody that you could be sitting on your porch in 50 years time going look what was made isn’t it fabulous? Or is this somebody you’re not going to be talking to again in five years time. So sometimes you just need to take that step back. and have a think.
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Is it the Right Time to Be Starting a Business?
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