Best Business Expert

Starting up a business can be a thrilling experience. There is nothing like the feeling of brainstorming ways to serve customers, dream up shockingly innovative products and services, and clever ways to deliver that offering to the marketplace. It’s no wonder that we’ve coined a word for the entrepreneurs who do this kind of thing over and over and over and over: "Serial entrepreneurs".

Your start-up might be something you operate from the dining room table in the evenings and on weekends when you’re not at your day-job or it might be a high-concept, high tech effort that has venture capitalists drooling all over themselves to get to you. Regardless of what it looks like, there is one truth about your business that you need to keep in mind:

You may THINK you have a business, but until your first sale is made, you do not.

As soon as you make that sale, you’re officially in business and you need to figure out whatever you did right to close deal #1 and repeat that process. But until that sale is made, you have a non-profit organization!

The problem is, lots of people have great ideas about business – innovative offerings or new ways of delivering a product. Great. But even if they set up all the infrastructure and legal documentation and advertising, they still have a non-profit. Only a skilled few can get that business idea (+ infrastructure and legal documentation and advertising) and turn it into a real business. And that is the reason why so many businesses fail in the first years.

Ask any seasoned business owner and they will tell you that "build it and they will come" is always the dream of every entrepreneur but it is rarely the reality. Instead, it’s more like "build it and then chase after them". Even advertising is not as effective as sales. Advertising just creates awareness and rarely brings people all the way to closing of the deal.

What business success really takes is good old fashioned sales: Generating leads, knocking on doors, cold calling, networking.

Case in point: A colleague of mine is a freelance writer. He says that every 3 to 6 months he’s asked by friends or family "can you show me how to make a living as a writer so I can do it too?". And of those people, very very few actually follow through. They’re always shocked to discover that it takes SALES to do the job.

Now, after having written all that, some of you will point to me that sites like Twitter do just fine without any revenue. That is an excellent question and almost deserving of its own post. However, I will link to this site – http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/01/twitters-busine.html – which helps to explain how many websites (especially web 2.0 and social media companies) start free but do eventually close the deal.

Contemporary VA

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