How do you actually start a business from nothing?
Competing at the toughest mudder a 24 hour assault course race- starting a business is not this bad
One of the missions I had when creating Relaxation Station is to show other people that starting a new business is possible. You don’t need a million dollar idea, you don’t need hundreds of thousands of pounds to get started, you don’t need an in-depth idea of accounting/finance and you certainly aren’t going to know everything from the get go. With the advancement of AI, the job market in shambles and university level education meaning less and less to employers many people seem to be unable to find the right path for them. Well what if that right path is something no one explored before? What if the solution is entrepreneurship? It’s the only ‘career’ where you can utilize all the ai tools at your disposal, learn what you are passionate about, put years of education and experience to use.
How do you get started?
Something I find so frustrating is that when trying to learn from experts they cannot articulate exactly what they did to succeed. Here are the exact steps I took to come up with and begin Relaxation Station:
Constantly look out for business ideas. There had been a few false starts with starting my own business but I kept looking for business ideas from about 2020 to 2026 that I could implement and create these included: Duolingo for Golf, a creativity and art label (Cr8 3), a ‘get off the apps’ dating app encouraging people to only meet up in person in nightly events and starting my own Chess online coaching classes. With each idea I looked at 3 things: 1. Did this business solve a problem? 2. Was I passionate about the problem? 3. Do I have the resources/ skillset to bring this idea to reality? In reality with most of these ideas I barely had 1 let alone 2 of these 3 criteria.
After 6 years of flirting with ideas and trying small projects I stumbled across this video, Simon Squibb dives into how to get started on a new business venture from the ground up. I took 1 thing from this video- do what you are PASSIONATE ABOUT. No seriously, don’t do something because you see a gap in the market, don’t do something because it solves someone else’s problem, don’t do something because you saw someone else do it and definitely don’t try a business which is someone else’s get rich quick scheme.
So I started to write down any time I had a business idea I was passionate about, until eventually I took myself on a solo camping trip and said ‘by the end of this weekend I will have come up with the idea I will create a business with’. Once that was out into the world it was an assured action I must take. Sitting on the campsite hill looking over the South Downs, legs and back aching from 3 hours of hiking made me think ‘I would kill for a sauna and cold plunge right now’. Which led me to my next question: ‘why isn’t there a sauna and cold plunge here?’. This campsite had no electricity and was based on a very steep hill making access difficult. Bingo.
Saunas and cold plunges were something I had used weekly for years and they had taken me from a semi suicidal obese 19 year old to an optimistically chipper and fit 28 year old. Ok so I now have an idea I am passionate about. So what? How is this different to every other time I’ve come up with an idea and tried for a couple of month and got no where with it? Well in this instance I took the time to write a business plan- this took about 3 months.
Writing a business plan is a fantastic way of making sure that: 1. you are genuinely passionate enough about this idea to begin, 2. this idea has merit and will make you some money, 3. this idea is feasible with your skillset and resources. If an idea requires £3 million in start-up capital and 7 years to become profitable it may not be a good place to start for your first business.
After writing my business plan I spent a month going to everyone I knew who ran their own business and were successful in doing so. I asked them (very politely) if they would take my business plan and rip it to shreds. Find every flaw, every problem, every typo, wrong figure or inconsistency possible. In doing so you see where your weaknesses are, but also where a bank might say no to your proposal when applying for a loan.
This is the most important step in starting a business. If you have a thorough well thought out, costed and actionable business plan you now have created your own road map for success in your first two years. By contrast if you don’t believe in your idea any more, that’s valuable too! It is virtually free to write a new business plan with a new idea the next day. Once you have your plan ready and an idea of what resources you have to get your idea off the ground your journey can begin.
