“I have the world’s best idea — but I can’t do it because I have no capital and I earn $18 / hr.”
I have heard pretty much any excuse you can think of why people can’t raise capital — however I will any claim that it has never been easier.
Just over the last couple of years, the banks has started to introduce negative interests, so you actually are paying something like -0.25%, rather than normally getting interests. So people who have $200.000+ (£150.000) in their savings account or investment bank accounts has never been more interested in finding alternatives.
But even before this happen I still think it was fairly easy to raise the capital, especially when you think about we have banks, angel investors (entrepreneurs that re-invest their earnings), Venture Capital, Pension schemes and the newer Crowdfunding such as Kickstarter.
Even everybody is against you and no body believe you; you can still convince a couple of 1000’s people on Kickstarter and then you are good to go — then you would have raised the money anyway.
I have over the last few years spent hundreds if not thousands of hours on advising people that are in exactly this situation — and I truly try to listen. The real picture is just far from what they write in the media, and what you might hear in your network. When I then ask people to show me a 10 pages Business plan with a 2 page budget and a 2 page executive summary, they usually come back 3–6 months later, and has put a lot of thought into this, while working for low salary and still attending to parties and watching entire seasons of stuff on Netflix.
Let me break it to you — if you want to build a business, you start TODAY. Don’t go to bed, build you business.
But; “I HAVE NO MONEY??”
This simply doesn’t matter. If you have $100/£100 in your account, then go down to your local 99p/99cents shops, start scanning things with your Amazon app and see where you can make profits. I bet you can spend £10 and make £40 with minimal efforts!
Work you way up.
Do you want to start a car dealership and live off that, just to take something that requires a huge cash outlay and a significant cash flow in your day to day operation — then there is a solution for that.
Go to Google, search for “Car Accessories Wholesale” then you can find stuff that you can buy cheaper than it’s sold for that it’s on Ebay/Amazon, so you quickly can start to build a small business around the topic, but you build up the capital — you start to build your business in a way where you self-finance a much larger percent.
The benefit of this model is also that you have tens of 1000’s of emails signed up for your newsletter, by the time you start you car dealership — so you then can get a flying start on your business.
The real thing is that you need to put in your effort today, to get the befits in 6–24 months.
But you have to change your mentality — and start finding ways that you make money instead of searching for capital.
Once you just have shown a little bit proof of concept, and that you can run a business — then an investor will almost beg you to take their money at a much lower valuation than if they invested into warm air. This is the real deal — most people don’t have what it takes actually to run and build a business — so once you can prove YOU CAN, then it’s so much easier to get people to believe in you and help you.
Live is about CREATING opportunities NOT WAITING for them.
Get on with it.
Do you think I’m wrong? Send me an email and tell me why? jh@jannikhansen.co.uk
Let’s change the world — by starting changing your life!
