Part time business life-cycle (part1)
Posted on August 28, 2006
How can you tell that your start-up is not a start-up anymore?
Keep asking myself lately, how can I tell my start-up is not a start-up anymore? Is there a period of time, a number of customers or a turnover that could mean you’re no longer a start-up?
Business literature defines the business life-cycle as a four stages process:
- Idea/start-up
- Growing
- Maturity
- Decline
and here you can see a chart and that’s probably the most referenced book on the net:
For a regular business seems to be easy to define and determine what’s the current stage. But , on the other hand, It’s one and a half year since I’ve started Energybyte as a Web company and 108 blog posts more experienced and still think I’m in the idea/start-up area. How on earth could I define the grow stage for a part time company that is meant to keep as a side job?
OK. So what do we have so far? And let’s argument it with the links to posts I wrote so far (a lot of links, but then again there is a lot of stuff I wrote about).
- Idea/start-up
I’ll bet the first question that pops out when you think about opening a business is: Entrepreneurship: is this going to work for me? I’ve did my thinking for about half a year and the most frequent feeling you’re going to have is that you are not ready yet (is this a good moment in life to start a business?) and second that you don’t have an unique idea. If you can manage this feeling start looking for Kwowledge resources for Entrepreneurs and step forward - there are probably 2 directions you could go:
- a ) do something that is related to your regular job
- b ) make your some money out of your hobby
Either ways, you will be going from Entrepreneurship fear to the World is mine feeling. I’ve did the “something that is related to your regular job” thing, and after some thinking I’ve decided to go the Part time Entrepreneurship way because of it’s advantages.
I’ve started by finding out the legal implications with my employer and create a Business plan.
If you got past this part, you will probably think about where to have your office and office types - this happens just before incorporating your business. Need also think about boostraping or other ways to financing.
Let’s say you have everything sorted out legally, business plan in place, ready to go. Now comes the bad part: finding your first customer. You’re heading directly into Start-up stress and believe me, it could take months to get things going. I’m not sure how many deals you will remember during the business life-cycle, but you will surely remember your first customer
Ooops! Forgot about the business name. That’s something that took some 2 weeks of thinking, somewhere in between looking for knowledge resources and incorporation. Remember: pick a wrong name and you will suffer, pick a good name and it won’t matter after all.
You will probably change your business plan in a while and might even do something different than planning in the beginning. Right, so we went from making applications to making sites and web applications; I’ve lost my both initial partners and went to have other 2; we won some battles and we lost some. But we did survive, not because we were better, but because we were flexible.
More in a blog near you soon 
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