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!

Small business owners come from various fields with many different skillsets, but in this role they are all tasked with wearing far more hats than it’s reasonable to expect expertise in. Unfortunately the amount of time spent wearing each hat tends to be proportional to the amount of experience a particular business owner has in that area. Thus some small businesses have amazing tech, some have impecceable books, and others have brilliant marketing. Just as true is that some don’t take advantage of technology, some use napkins for bookkeeping, and others were built “expecting walk-in traffic”.

It’s not reasonable to expect to be able to ignore the facets of business that you don’t know much about and hope to compensate with a really great product or strong marketing. A great business succeeds in many areas because the owner(s) have taken the time to learn the additional skills or find great people who have them. It may seem like a daunting learning curve to start picking up accounting and marketing, but this is actually your opportunity to repeatedly increase profits, save time, and eliminate many levels of stress.

I was in high school when I first became interested in owning a business. I knew a lot about computers. I could fix them, build them, and make them do my evil bidding. Unfortunately I knew nothing about running a business so my computer sales & repair venture didn’t go very far. I progressed onto other ventures and after aquiring my fair share of lumps I developed more respect and seriousness for the business side of business. I started reading about marketing, business management, and more marketing. I expanded my horizons gradually to improving my sales skills, networking, and accounting. I can only say that each time I wished I had learned sooner and faster as the techniques I’ve picked-up have doubled and tripled my profits over and over again. Certainly worth the time and the learning materials cost, both of which are trivial compared to the rewards of knowing what you are doing.

As Tilted Pixel’s plans to grow into an office and fulltime staff begin to come to fruition I will now be shifting more time to learning how to be a great boss and revisiting the strategies of How to Bag an Elephant. With every stage in the life of a business there are new and exciting things to be learned and mastered.

When starting your business, regardless of what background you come from, take the time to fill in your skills gaps. One of the advantages of starting a business with somebody rather than hacking it alone is that you can find a partner or team whose skillsets are very different from yours. In fact if you are looking for serious VC funding you are going to have well-balanced management team whose competencies sum up to a great business mind. If this is a solo venture then don’t allow yourself to be intimidated by new areas. I always dreaded learning accounting, but now I can do my bookkeeping on my own and could even survive without accounting software doing the calculations for me. These skillsets can be picked-up in various ways. I’ve learned a lot from university courses, speakers, online resources, and books. They all have their place in the learning process so I wouldn’t recommend limiting yourself to one resource.

Some of the books that I’ve found particularly useful are:

• Bag the Elephant: How to Win and Keep Big Customers
• Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got
• Getting Things Done
• Selling 2.0

Reading is key to having new ideas to fuel the expansion of your business. I currently have 30+ unread business books that I’m slogging through, many of which have provided me terrific ideas to utilize in my business. Sometimes I come across a book that I feel is worth mentioning on this blog, and having read Bag the Elephant by Steve Kaplan I can happily say that this is one of those books.

The book is all about the dream of many small business owners - bagging that large corporate customer that will provide steady revenue and skyrocket the growth of the company. Through 200 well-written pages Kaplan presents a practical plan for doing just that. He demystifies the process involved from start to finish in a blueprint that any small business owner can follow, spelling out the big and small points of interacting with a giant company and its bureaucracy.

What really sold me on this book and the techniques inside is the practical approach it takes. Kaplan has bagged his own elephants, with the first ever being Proctor & Gamble. He draws on this experience heavily within the book, with the Proctor and Gamble account being the focal example as Kaplan lays out his plan. In addition to the usual high level business recipes that business books love to provide, he shares indispensible tricks that he picked up along the way such as the time he got his status upgraded from supplier to contractor to get his own security badge (allowing him to setup and attend meetings far more easily than the competition).

It goes without saying that a truly large contract is a breakthrough for a company and properly managed it is the start of a truly booming business. This plan provides an amazing playbook to draw from to accomplish this and to do so without collapsing the company along the way. Kaplan makes sure to cover how to manage the relationship and the critical mistakes people make that could cause the deal to destroy them. Everything within the book is highly readable too, making it one of the scarce non-fiction books that are hard to put down.

I highly recommend picking this title up as I can’t imagine any business owner not being able to learn a significant amount from it, whether you are eyeing your first elephant or are looking to expand your impressive client list.