Advice to a Friend on Starting Her Business

I was emailing back and forth with a friend the other night who is starting up a small business. She was struggling with writing copy for her website and wanted to know what I thought. Seeing her agonize over the process reminded me of something a very wise ex-colleague said to me when I was getting to ready to launch my business. I had gone to him for an opinion on our business plan.

He said:

There are two things you need to know:

1) Everything will take longer and cost more than you originally think.

2) You will never get it right the first time, so you might as well just get started and change it as you go along.

His advice was spot on. Everything did take longer and cost more, and the things I agonized over 6 years ago have all changed now anyway. We found better ideas, we changed our business model, we learned that our clients were not who we thought they would be – everything changed! And all the learning we’ve done for the past 6 years is going into the new website we’ll launch in January (which we have agonized over and which has cost more and taken longer than we originally thought!)

I told my friend this and I hope it helped. And that got me thinking – why not ask you guys. So that’s what I’m doing. What advice you would give her on this new adventure?

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