Last week I finally received papers stating that I now own my very own corporation (federally registered in Canada)! Tilted Pixel Inc. is now my 100% owned-by-me corporate baby. As you can probably tell by the reduced posting frequency I’ve been working extra hard to pull together everything related to that while keeping up with the ever-increasing work queue.

Incorporation of the company represents a bit of a graduation ceremony from a small business idea to a serious commitment and a validated business model. Less than a year ago I had a registered sole proprietorship, business cards, a single client, and three oversized photo prints with the company logo (for “exhibitions”). I now have three website projects on the go at any given moment and a solid plan for expanding the company further and further. Keeping the business profitable and growing has been a matter of applying what I’ve learned in my previous ventures and sticking to the fundamentals of building the business one solid block at a time.

What makes Tilted Pixel work? It’s actually a very simple concept, albiet shockingly ignored in the website development world. Tilted Pixel delivers what clients ask for with websites that are built to spec and can be edited by the client rather than requiring the web developer. I’ve invested the past three years into a terrific website development architecture custom built exactly to deliver on this promise. It would have been easier in the beginning to use an off-the-shelf solution, but had I gone this route I would have lost control over the services and capabilities that I am able to offer my clients. The software would have ruled the company. With my architecture I never have to feel restricted since even if a capability is not there I know it can be created.

I’m basically tooting my own horn in this post but this milestone is tremendously important to me and something that I feel like sharing with all my readers Feel free to post stories of your own business start-up achievements in the comments!

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!

The first time I consciously decided to start a business (computer sales & repairs), I held an amazing amount of misconceptions. They could all be summarized as “money simultaneously grows on trees and is brought in by the wheelbarrow by customers eager to purchase my wares”. You’ll have to forgive me, as I was still well in high school.

To my credit I knew that I had to work hard, but somehow in my mind there was a nice thick line drawn directly between work and success. If I worked hard through the night, slept through class, and put every ounce of strength that I had into the business, then profits and growth were my divine right. I was half correct of course, as rarely is an easy way of making money simply handed out on a silver platter. But somewhere I had made a terrible mistake in the formula and got half of it wrong. It turns out that you can toil endlessly in the fiercest conditions known to man, but if what you produce is of value to few then your rewards will be proportionally small. That big thick line does exist, but it’s actually drawn between success and value.

The Real Reason Why a Business is Successful and the Consequences of Using the Wrong Formula

The principles here can apply to VC-funded start-ups with $6 million in the bank too. However today is all about small business, the kind that I have started several times, and which can turn pizza money into a high income or reduce your income to not being able to afford pizza.

In my case I had worked very hard, but most of that time had been spent on an unadvertised company website that nobody would visit, writing paragraphs extolling company virtues that no one cared about. I had spent virtually no time on the things that would have mattered, such as handing out fliers door to door or networking (unless you counted trying to sell $2000 machines to penniless high school friends). I also firmly butchered the notion of “you gotta spend money to make money”, holding dearly to my heart the belief that effective marketing had to be paid for and by not having money I had no chance against the competition. I was terribly wrong again; my current venture has still spent less on marketing than what I had proposed for the computer sales business, but it’s making thousands in profit per month and growing quickly. I wanted fancy business cards, full color fliers, expensive newspaper ads, and everything else that other companies had, except that I didn’t have $100K in starting capital. Boy, what was I thinking.

So a high school kid knowing nothing about business failed. Big surprise…

Except that I’m not the only one that got the formula wrong, and I was certainly not the oldest! When statistics like 90% of small businesses fail in the first five years abound and examples of basic business mistakes can be found by walking a mere block through any downtown, it doesn’t take much to see that a whole lot of business owners are getting the fundamentals wrong too. Rational, intelligent, and well-intended people, who when reading this article may think “wow I would never be that stupid”. The problem is that until you look back at the situation and write down what it is that you did, the mistakes aren’t nearly so obvious.

Having realized that my original “work very hard” formula was wrong, I’m now convinced that following the correct one with just as much passion and dedication can lead to highly predictable success. The real trick is to provide value, as much and as often as you can. The more value that you provide, the more profit will follow. It is your duty as an honest, ethical and smart business person to come up with ways of providing value and providing that value to as many people as it will benefit. Uncoincidentally this is a recipe for making a whole bunch of money. Convinced and ready to begin?

You are going to start a successful business, and you will do so with the correct time-tested formula used by everyone from BMW to Walmart to As Seen on TV products. You are on a mission to consciously provide value, over and over again, and you will apply this philosophy to all aspects of your business. Your product, be it a commodity like a computer part or something entirely unique and handmade, will be put forth in a way that puts your customer’s needs front and center.

Your business will be delivering something useful to solve a problem. But you won’t stop there. You will find the best way to provide it to the people that need it. Your marketing, your sales, your shipping, and your customer service will be just as focused on the customer and the value that you can provide as the product itself. It’s all equally important, because you are only providing value if people know about your valuable product and have an easy way of obtaining it. The truer this sentence is for your business, the better off it is (so long as you don’t have a business model that actually loses money… which happens far more than you might think).

Starbucks didn’t hit its culturally engraved status because its staff is able to provide the extremely unique and skill-heavy service of making a cup of coffee and charging an arm and a leg for it. The people that disagree with this are (shockingly) not the owners of mutli-million dollar coffee businesses themselves. There’s something more to it, and thats the entire Starbucks experience created around it. An experience that does indeed provide people something they desire and thus value that they will pay for. They took a commodity and turned it into a highly profitable business. What you might not know is that they weren’t even the first ones. Decades prior Second Cup, another highly successful coffee store, had revolutionized coffee too by providing a good cup of coffee to people on the go. Prior to that coffee purchased by the cup was a throw-in at diners and tasted like it. Just because someone has already done something revolutionary doesn’t mean there’s no room for you to up the ante.

As a small business starter who probably has little or no money this doesn’t apply to you. You can’t possibly be able to provide value on that level. You can’t come up with a product that customers will happily buy and give you rave reviews for. Providing excellent value won’t allow you to compete against the big established company. Oh wait that’s me from high school talking. Yes you can provide value and yes you can get a business going on next to nothing. Just by sticking to the fundamentals and getting them right you can leap ahead of most of the competition by creating a profitable business. The entirety of the business model for my new venture has been to fill in as many gaps between website clients and website development companies as possible, thus providing genuine value that gives clients a reason to choose me. I do all this through a sustainable business model that I’m constantly evolving to become a more efficient value generator. It’s worked very well, growth is incredible, and my initial investment was the cost of a business registration and a few phone calls. Nothing I’ve done has required advanced calculus, divine wisdom, or a pile of money. So what’s stopping you from doing the same in your business and succeeding?

Oh and by the way, none of this is original or new. Materials with insights into all manner of the value-oriented philosophy are widely-available. I first came across it myself after buying Jay Abraham’s Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, and I’ve seen it in countless other places too, including business class. It is not a lack of knowledge of this concept that is the problem, it is a lack of business owners seeking and implementing it.