Starting Your Own Business

"Last week Saturday marked exactly 3 months since I officially started my own business. I haven’t been great with responding to people asking how it's going (especially with my friends from abroad - sorry guys!), so I figured it would be a good idea to post an update on Facebook. Being more of a doer than a thinker, I basically decided to just start doing and improve things along the way. I think I decided that I wanted to start my own business about a month prior to registering it and two weeks after registering it, I already launched everything. It was far from perfect, but hey, that way people could see and experience it and since I like to work with real feedback from people and data instead of just assuming things myself, this allowed me to improve things based on real results instead of my own opinion and assumptions.

I gave myself 3 months to have a play, test things, get my first (happy) clients and to set up a basic structure. Now that it's up and running, it's time to focus on professionalizing everything and scaling the things that have been working so far. Simply's business model has changed a little bit, but is still divided into two businesses; the webshop on the one hand and the consulting business on the other hand.

Tineke Zwart

The webshop has now become a gathering platform for unique products from small and creative entrepreneurs and is more than just a website with products. I want it to be more than that because there is a great story of an incredibly dedicated and hard-working entrepreneur behind every product and I think those stories should be told. I stopped with the products from the U.S. as positive advice outlined it looks weird seeing teeth whitening kits next to modern art I still have a few in stock though so send me a PM if you want a Hollywood smile just in time for Christmas.

Setting up a webshop is harder than I expected, but I love doing it and I really believe in the concept. I don't think I'll be able to make a big profit with it (in the short run), but I believe the value of it will increase over time and it is rewarding in other ways. I don't only get to help other entrepreneurs to pursue their passion, but it also offers me a great way to test certain marketing campaigns, which if turn out to be successful, I can use to assist clients from the consulting business. That way I don't have to use their budget for testing purposes.

Thankfully, Simply Consulting has been doing well. My goal was to get a few clients with a bigger budget because I prefer having 10 bigger clients that pay me, for example, 400 Euros a month than 100 small clients which pay me 40 Euros a month. My first clients all asked me to do more work which I am really happy with and from the beginning of November, I'll start working with 3 new clients. I've always had a big interest in understanding how different businesses work and therefore I'm really excited to be able to contribute to the organizational goals of multiple businesses instead of just one.

With that said, I also hired my first employee! Or actually my first volunteer. Since the beginning of this month, my mum is taking care of all the finances and the orders from the webshop, which has been of great help.

All in all, the first 3 months have been an awesome adventure in which I already learned more than in some whole year's of my life. Of course I've also had moments when I wondered what the &€?! I got myself into or when I felt a bit lonely because I’m doing almost everything by myself, but those moments don't outweigh the determination and excitement.

For the next phase, I think it's important to surround myself with people I look up to, who are smarter than me and who challenge me, so therefore I've made an effort to get more coaching. I also did this because I simply missed having a Team Manager or someone (an outsider) to spar with on a regular basis.

Wow that became quite the story, haha. If you read the whole post, thank you for taking the time to do so. I hope you enjoyed it and have a better idea now of what I've been up to.

Last but not least, since we're getting close to Sinterklaas and Christmas, please make sure to take a look at the webshop on simplyconsulting.nl. A lot of new products from different entrepreneurs have been added since the beginning of this month, many of which are great to give as a present."