My own business

[KevV]

Hello guys,
I'm new here and wondering if you could help me.
I am 17, and live in France. The working age here is 16, but no company wil employ you unless you are 18, with a driver's license. I have therfore decided to make money my own way and start my own business.
I thought of creating my own website, and selling stuff I found on alibaba.com, but as I do not have a credit card account, it would be too complicated, if not impossible.
Please can you help?
Thanks in advance

[akula]

well, that's the trick.

working as a founder is all about being resourceful.

ALL entrepreneurs, everybody, are faced with the problem of how do I get something I don't currently have whilst having little to offer in return.

that's basically the challenge for company founders - aggregating resources outside of their control. in your case, you need money and legal authority - both of which are resources for you to acquire.

how you go about doing this, is the skill which differentiates between good and bad entrepreneurs.

are you interested in learning this skill?

[KevV]

Well I would be interested in learning this skill. I really want to start my own business, but the problem is where I'm at. I don't have good knowledge on how to begin.

[akula]

sure, would you like the long (recommended) or the short version?

[Dealer27]

give is the long version akula! Where do you get all this? Brian Tracy?

[KevV]

I'll go for the long version

[akula]

I'll go for the long version

Ok, I'll do the long version, but keep in mind that it's only an impossibly concise summary of a much larger body of knowledge. Since I'm not familiar with how you learn - I'll slowly chew through concepts - please do not mistake this for me being patronising.

To answer your question on "how to begin?", I will introduce you to entrepreneurship as a trade and cover the four entrepreneurial roles. If you can understand these four things - you'll know exactly how to begin - and where to go from there.

1) Entrepreneurship is a trade: Similarly to roofing, medicine, network administration and hot dog vending - entrepreneurship is a very specific occupation with its own skills, best practices and rules of thumb. Entrepreneurs who are good at this trade - achieve good results - those who fail at this trade, achieve bad results.

So to truly understand the answer to your question - you must see the context where entrepreneurship is specific trade, that takes many years to learn (like dentistry), it's not for everybody - and its hard. Most importantly, you must see that the trade of entrepreneurship is dependant on entrepreneurs knowing how to do fours things: be an investor, be a founder, be a CEO, and be a company director. These are the four entrepreneurial roles.

a) Role as an investor: To begin, you must have the skills to pick venture worth beginning. If you do this job well - people will follow you and you'll have no problems getting things off the ground. If you don't, no one will help you (and by help, I don't necessarily mean hand outs) and your ventures will not get off the ground.

How to pick ideas, and quantifying them into investment opportunities, which other people recognise as good investment opportunities is a complicated skill which I invite you to learn.

Direct answer to your question: To begin your venture you must find an attractive opportunity which is more attractive than other opportunities based on a common checklist which everybody uses to determine whether a business idea is a good or a bad business idea.

b) Role as founder: Having applied things like an investment thesis and due diligence to find good opportunities, to get your business kick stated you must do your job as a founder.

Doing your job as a founder requires you to complete a particular equation. I won't go into the details of it (unless you require me to), but essentially your role as a founder requires you to leverage market intelligence to aggregate resources currently outside of your control.

The easy way to remember this function is to think of it like an episode of law an order. You are the lawyer and you must put together a brief of evidence which will convince the jury (customers, employees, financiers etc), that what you are offering is a good idea/product/job.

Direct answer to your question: Having identified a good investment opportunity, to begin you must do your job as a founder to complete the Silver equation. The equation, amongst other things, will require you to leverage information to make people do things they had no prior intention of doing.

I'll leave it here because you don't need to know about the third and forth entrepreneurial roles (just yet). I do, however, encourage you to ask questions about how to do your job well as an investor and company founder.

[akula]

give is the long version akula! Where do you get all this? Brian Tracy?

haha. good question.

I receive my information from three sources:

1) southerncrossventures.com vc blogs. this is a stream of daily blog posts from about 150 venture capitalists who collectively have over a thousand years of hands on startup experience

2) I was in charge of compiling the entrepreneurship catalogue at my uni and have a thorough familiarity with texts like New Venture Creation: Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century.

3) In the future, I hope to continue to teach entrepreneurship at a postgrad level, so I spend quite some time going through papers in places like Babson's Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research and Kauffman.

..I know, I'm sick

[KevV]

Wow
Thanks a lot for this very detailed explanation. Took me some time to fully understand, but now I understand. Now I have to find a good oportunity to invest in, and get the ball rolling. I will have to look around the french law to see exactly what I can do, being a minor and all. Tips on how to get started would be welcome though.
Once again thanks a lot akula

[akula]

Tips on how to get started would be welcome though.

Nice. I'm glad you're interested in this field. Maybe one day you will employ a lot of people (maybe even give me a job ;-)

Yes, there is a tip. In your function as a founder, it's my advice to you to invest some time and do about 1,000 surveys with your target market.

This is NOT to make sure that what you have is a good idea and people will actually buy stuff from you (but that's also important). The more important reason, is that if you have this data, this evidence, you can safely convince people to help you with your startup.

Note an important point. You don't want to be one of the millions of entrepreneurs who start companies without doing primary market research and then wonder why they have no customers, no employees, no support and why they ultimately have to close shop.

This is not a useless-Danny-Nerezov-style-academic-fairytale. Do the surveys. Don't start your company unless you do.

[F360]

Tips on how to get started would be welcome though.

If your interested in buying from alibaba, do it. Ive been doing it recently and doubling my money each time a shiment sells.
You dont need a credit card, find a seller that will accept a telegraphic transfer (and I aussume 95% will). Once you found a supplier you would like to buy from, post it here and I will see if it looks good.

Also, check out my site in my signiture, it was made for people like you.

[KevV]

Thanks for the advice everyone.
I've had a thought of what I'd do, and here it is:
I think first asking around, and try to find out the most demanded product for which there is not a lot of supply. Then i'd go on alibaba.com and find a supplier. I'd buy a small quantity of the product and sell it myself, using handouts and all. If it is successful and I make a good profit, I'd try and create my own proper website to sell the product on the internet. I've had a look around, and I'll have to see between ebay, or commonacre.com (is it any good?).
This is my idea, and I just would like to know what you think about it.

[KevV]

Hey, F360,
I've been trying to go on your www.importersdiary.com for the last 4 days, but it does not seem to work. Is there a new site or somethin'?
Thanks for letting me know, I wish to see your website.

[F360]

It will be up again today,I trashed it as I had no time for it