What I’d tell myself if I started my business again tomorrow

I start my business in April 2019 from nothing and it was the first time I’d really done anything like it in terms of being thrown off a cliff straight into the deep end with absolutely no fallback. I floundered a bit in some respects and in others just went out there and killed it, but in all cases I learned some really, really valuable lessons. If I was going to start again tomorrow knowing what I know now, this is what I’d tell myself/ change about what I did and how I did it.

Don’t do business with anyone who won’t pay upfront

These guys have just been a nightmare the whole way through. They want you to provide the world and then don’t pay you, or pay incredibly late.

I’ve had two clients not pay us, both around the £3k — £6k mark, which is obviously a lot of money, and in the end, I had to go to court action to get a settlement. And then the one client I took on who didn’t pay upfront was nothing but needy. They also didn’t understand the meaning of needing time off!

Be yourself right from the start

When I started, I went along with trying to fit into a mould that I thought others would want, in order to win business. Unfortunately, I am not great at ‘masking’ and soon enough the real, brutally honest, sarcastic me would come out. And amazingly, people respected and appreciated it. Now, I don’t try and be someone I’m not. If a prospect doesn’t like what they see, we won’t fit anyway, so they’re more than welcome to go elsewhere and I am so much happier with it that way.

Don’t be like everyone else

In every industry, there is just a pile of sh*t, and people seem to think that they have to fit in this box of what they think people in that industry should be. I did this a bit at the start but, you know, I swear, I am too honest for my own good sometimes, I have a weird sense of humour and I’m not in the accountancy box AT ALL. In fact, I got 5 clients from a post with the word “sh*t” in the title, after I had had a debate with my ex-business partner about whether it was a good idea or not. Cornerstone FD is not your typical ‘Accountant’ type business in any way, shape or form and it seems to have worked for us, so dare to stand out.

Save up some money before taking the plunge, or build the business on the side of a day job

I was pretty much thrown into starting my business without much choice. I also didn’t have any savings or cash reserves and I hadn’t been paid by my previous employer for 3 months because he hadn’t listened to me and buried his head in the sand for a year beforehand when I was telling him the business wasn’t making any money, so it was pretty much “how am I going to pay my mortgage?!” from day 1. Somehow I did it, but it really wasn’t easy! It’s taught me some really valuable lessons, but if I was to do it again I’d do it slower with some cash behind me from the outset.

Do what you want to do from the start and don’t undervalue yourself

Further to the previous point, because I had to somehow pay my mortgages, I took my eye off what I actually set out to do and ended up providing services that were not even remotely interesting to me and charged wayyy too little for it all in the process. I then had an uphill battle to up my prices to the level I should have been but without alienating or losing our original clients.

It worked out in the end, but I wasted a good year or so undercharging for the things I didn’t actually want to do in the first place.

Get your systems up and running

This was another part of the fallout from my forced entry into starting my own business and having to pay my mortgage. I was so busy getting out there and getting clients (which I did very well indeed, going from 0 to 25 clients in about 4 months, and then had to close my books in September because I was so busy!), I didn’t get the systems in place first. So, for example, I’d take on a client and then I’d have to manually update a contract, email it to them with 5 or so attachments, wait for them to come back to me and then manually file the documents on the storage system. This process could take weeks, and in the meantime, I’d start work without making sure they’d signed their DD mandate and sent a contract back… silly me! Now, this whole process is automated and I don’t get anything added to my task list without the forms having been signed and DD set up. But it was a slog setting all that up and at the same time as having to make sure our wonderful clients were looked after.

Don’t believe the corporate bullsh*t

Just because you’ve worked high up in corporate, doesn’t mean you’ll be any good at building a business from scratch. I know a few people who have gone from being at the top of their game in a large company to trying to start their own business and just having absolutely no idea what they’re doing. The thing with starting a business is that it’s not enough to just be good at the one thing you want to do, you need to know how to do marketing, how to sell, how to interpret financial information, how to organise your own time and task list, how to prioritise what’s important and what will have the biggest gains by time ratio etc. You don’t have someone else do that for you anymore — you are that someone else!

The “build it and people will come” thing doesn’t work — business doesn’t work like that, annoyingly.