We all get the same 24 hours each day, of which almost half is devoted to attending to sleeping, eating, transportation and errands. On a good day this leaves 12 hours with which you are free to do as you please to further the achievement of your goals and desires. How is it that some people manage to get so much more out of that 12 hours than others? Why is the time of some people so valuable that they can command $250/hr for their attention? How do I go about earning that, and perhaps more?

The answer to this lies in the prehistoric days, a vague and poorly documented era that I am free to take artistic liberty with. Og was a particularly smart caveman living in that particular era and like all good cavemen he spent the bulk of his days hunting animals while simultaneously avoiding being hunted by said animals. Og was rather fascinated with the world around him, often getting lost in his primitive caveman thoughts as he spied a particularly interesting leaf. It was perhaps the first case of ADD ever noted, and unfortunately for Og it meant that animals would often creep up on him and catch him off-guard. Many wounds later Og realized that he was very poorly equipped in comparison to the saber-tooth tiger that had just run him up a tree. Something had to be done lest he starved.

Og did some heavy thinking and came to the realization that a wooden stick would help him fend off attackers if wielded in the right way. It was a bold idea with much potential. Up until now everyone simple wrestled smaller prey to the ground or settled on sharing termites with the chimpanzees (history suggests it was them that first invented the stick, but accurate patent records have yet to be dug up). After much testing and determination Og had his first functional hunting stick and the first real meal in weeks. The human race had its first tool and soon Og became the most well-fed caveman around.

Other cavemen began to take note of his bulging waistline and came to Og hooting angrily. They too wanted to hunt more effectively as the cavewomen at home were beginning to notice how much better Og was fairing. Og pondered this situation carefully and gestured wildly that yes he would share the powerful secret of the Hunting Stick. In exchange each caveman using said stick would be required to provide Og with one chunk of mammoth meat per month. It was a fair bargain and so Og was able to provide food for himself and his family nearly effortlessly.

So much is written about how to manage your time effectively, but performing low-output tasks efficiently will still get you far less than performing high-output tasks inefficiently. Og’s key to success was his propensity to find ways of leveraging his resources to achieve exponentially higher gain. His first breakthrough came from the stick, which allowed him to catch bigger prey faster than the other cavemen. Rather than using just himself to perform the work, he had transferred some of it to the stick. With the spare time this provided Og was able to think harder and an even bigger breakthrough came next. Og realized that he could equip others with a marvelous Hunting Stick in exchange for food. Suddenly Og didn’t have to do any hunting at all thanks to properly leveraging his resources (the stick idea). At this point historical records are again rather faint, but we can theorize that Og continued to profit from his invention by creating product upgrades like the Sharpened Hunting Stick, Hunting Stick Classic, and the Armored Tank.

You don’t need to be an inventor or a caveman to have this model work for you. What you do need is a change of mindset from the rat race of getting as much done as you humanly can within those 12 free hours into figuring out how much you can leverage your resources and abilities to exponentially increase the return you receive on each hour you work. As a work machine a human being is actually quite terrible. We are high maintenance, error-prone, and can only do so much work in a given period of time. The most productive use of that 12 hours is thinking up ways to generate value through available resources, and then putting those resources together to generate that value. You don’t want to get stuck requiring yourself to be able to generate the value, as the opportunity for expansion becomes highly limited. Og could have sold his hunting services rather than the Hunting Stick, but then he would have to be constantly working to receive payment and would have likely been stomped on by a mammoth. Remember that as impressive as a consultant’s $250/hr rate may sound, many millionaires are making much more than that from passive income streams and doing so while they sleep.

Being a university student is a really weird point in time to be. People who will go on to lead very normal and responsible lives temporarily lose their minds. Experimentation is the thing to do and “being young” is the perfect fallback when things go wrong. Most amazingly it is OK to fail and try something else, a lesson that is quickly lost upon graduation.

This is the perfect opportunity to not only wake-up in someone else’s house with no recollection of last night, but also to start a business!

I’m a Student that Wants to Start a Business Eventually, but Why Start One Now?

The perceived barriers to starting a business are a lack of time, money, and experience. Given infinite time and someone else’s money to play with the people who complain about this stuff would suddenly all become master entrepreneurs. Too bad real life doesn’t work this way. Everyone needs to start somewhere with all the risks and work associated with it.

As a student you don’t have a hell of a lot of assets to risk, so your total investment and risk in a business might be a month’s beer budget. Your bills are minimal and you only have yourself to support. Student loans and parents are there to fall back on if things go poorly. Unless you win the lottery it’s only going to get tougher to get started as you get older and start supporting a whole family plus a mortgage payment.

There’s no obligation to start something big that will make you rich or which you will run for the rest of your life. It’s always nice if things go that way, but you have so much to gain even from starting a little thing that nets you $200 total. You’re real return on your efforts will be the amazing experience you’ve gained, a very valuable asset in entrepreneurship.

I’ve started businesses in high school and university, two of which are now looking to be serious long-term successes. However many failed before launching, and others launched to deaf ears. I’ve noticed some things time and time again in my own ventures and those of my friends. From this experience I’ve decided to bring you some success points that are important for anyone starting a business, but are particularly strong points of failure for students.

Start Something Sensible

One of the lessons you may end up learning is that the carefully thought-out idea you had turned out to not be so good. This is tough because it spells almost certain doom from the start. Many students forget to do the whole “is it actually viable” check before going ahead with a venture. This doesn’t have to be a complex report involving looking up meaningless demographic statistics and printing pie charts. Ask yourself basic questions like “who is going to buy this?”, “why would they buy it?”, “how will they know about it?”, and “how will I make money?”. Now answer these questions honestly rather than with what you want to hear. Better yet run your idea by that brutually honest friend who won’t hesitate to tear it apart.

Check out this list of 8 stupid fratboy ideas for cliche examples of what not do. Note that it’s not so much the products that are bad, it’s the lack of thought characteristic to each one.

Spend Very Wisely, but Don’t be Cheap

There is a fine line between the importance of minimizing business expenditures on a shoestring budget and just plain being cheap. I forget who said that you can’t cost-cut your way to greatness, but it’s certainly true. Some stuff just plain makes sense to spend a little extra on, like 500 color business cards, or your own domain and a web host that won’t go down every Friday.

On the same note don’t try to start your business for nothing. There are good reasons for doing so, but not wanting to risk any money is not one of them. Given the financial situations of most students, I would say that as much as $500 can be risked before you’re looking at any substancial amount of money. Here in Ontario that is the cost of a single one term university course; if the business goes under you will still have gotten at least a course’s worth of knowledge and experience under your belt.

I find that the larger obstacle to putting your money into a business isn’t the actual financial situation somebody is in, but the fear of the sense of loss if things don’t work out. Ask yourself how your life will look if you do lose that money. Will it matter at all in the long run? Will it have been a genuinely bone-headed move in retrospect if it fails? If your answer to the latter is yes then your idea needs more thought.

Don’t Partner with Anyone Less Passionate Than You

The students that start a business together, particularly one that requires no upfront investment, and then do absolutely nothing are a university cliche. The excuses are always a lack of time and money, with neither partner ever being free at the same time. Exams and wing nights get in the way you know. Yes the cruel reality of university life has crushed these poor entreprising souls.

The reality is that running a business is a lot of hard work, and inevitably the amount of said work put into the venture by each person becomes equivalent to that of the person least serious about the project. If you don’t both firmly commit to a certain amount of time to spend on this, trust each other, and put real money into the game, stuff just isn’t going to happen.

Don’t partner with someone for the sake of partnering, only do it because your partner brings something important to the table and both of you are absolutely set on making the business a reality.

Have a Plan to Advertise the Hell Out of It

Those feel good stories in the press about student entrepreneurs making it big represent a miniscule portion of student businesses. No matter how cool your business idea is, you’ll find yourself very short on customers if you’re marketing plan involves a media frenzy begging for your story. You must promote the good old fashioned hard way, and make this your priority. If you have only ten things that you will do, that’s not enough. In all the successful campus events I’ve been involved, the promotion for those exceeded that. Think how much more it takes for a product or service that costs money. Be a Shameless Self Promoter.

You’ll find that most methods you try don’t work, or don’t work well. Keep trying new things while putting more effort into the strategies that are working. Make sure you can measure where you are getting your customers from too, otherwise you are doomed to continue spending significant time and money on the tactics that have failed.

Don’t Give Up Too Easily

School and life tend to get in the way very quickly. You do need to put some time and effort into this, and it can be harder to do when the initial excitement has worn off and you’re profits are $2 after two weeks of hard work. When your sales are inevitably much lower than you first expected, you need to analyze why that’s the case. Don’t give up too quickly, but don’t keep pushing forward blindly. Fix the problems in your business model and understand how you will eventually make money through realistic way. Few people have gotten it right the first time.

If you are looking at starting an online business be sure to read my guide to creating a successful e-venture where I cover many of the important considerations and pitfalls involved. Best of luck!

“It was great to meet you. May I have your card?”

“Sure it’s here somewhere. One sec. Oh I seem to be out, let me jot it down on this napkin here…”

This picturesque networking scenario gone horribly wrong has a habit of happening at the worst possible time. The problem? You didn’t bring your cards with you because you weren’t planning on meeting anyone. Here is your chance to get a big sale or a foot in the door and you’re messing it up already.

A Simple Tip to Avoid This Mess

I could tell you to simply bring your cards everywhere you go, but that hassle hasn’t worked for me. You constantly have to have your business card holder on you and that’s just unreasonable to remember. The trick that has worked well for me is to put them everywhere instead!

Subtle difference, but the idea is that forgetting the business card holder does not mean you’re out of luck. I have cards stashed in my wallet, clipboards, bags, jackets, shirts, filing cabinets, and anywhere else reasonable to keep cards. I have a habit of strategically littering them into portable compartments whenever it occurs to me.

This little tip has saved me a number of times, and the best part is that as I pull the card out from a trusty jacket pocket no one ever knows that I didn’t think about bringing my card.