What Business Should I Start?

Episode 1: What Business Should I Start?

Welcome to the first episode of the discussions podcast. We've got some really exciting guests coming up I'm looking forward to showing you guys some incredible business stories.

Just wanted to do a quick one today to introduce what this podcast is all about, and that is to talk to people about how they started their businesses, what challenges they faced then, what challenges they face now and what they've learned along the way, with the hope that seeing how they overcame their issues can inspire you to follow any passions or follow any dreams you may have when it comes to starting growing or scaling your own business.

So a little bit about me, my name is Campbell I created the brand called Desk Clarity that trains professionals in Excel, PowerPoint and Word and over the last year I've learned so much about digital marketing, about branding, about customer journeys, about website development, about even logo design for example.

There's so much to learn when you start a business and that is literally why I did it. I come from a finance background, so financial modelling, corporate valuation and corporate finance is my background and I felt like I just wasn't using all of my potential.

I was doing really good analytics and using my brain, and that felt good, but there was this whole creative side of me that wasn't being used. I wasn't doing any marketing, I wasn't doing any branding, or I guess strategy, for my own firm and I felt like I had the potential to do a lot more than just analysis, so I started thinking how can I start a business or what business could I launch at the moment.

And a lot of people are in that situation, and what I did is followed an old trick that Brian Tracy recommends and that works something a little bit like this. I could be saying it a little bit wrong but it's basically creating a Venn diagram of what you could offer and then what you would enjoy offering, so for me that involves creating a list of say 20 things that I could charge for and then creating a list of 20 things that I would enjoy doing.

And the overlap of those two sides of the Venn diagram were the potentials for me to start a business and lucky for me one of those was I had the ability to train others in how to use Excel, PowerPoint and Word better, and that was definitely something I've enjoyed in previous roles.

I used to build Financial models for clients and part of that involved explaining to them how to use Excel better and it gave me a good idea for what I should be doing. And then I just developed that idea further and finally launched it, which is a very exciting process.

Now this is just one way to come up with how to start a business, there's plenty. I like to think of the most simple one being take your current role and do it for yourself. I have a theory that's ready to be proven wrong, that any job can be taken into your own business even if you think of a surgeon, for example, you think they're stuck in a hospital. No, they could just start their own private practice and start planning for that now and my belief is that every role can be taken into a private practice if you do want to be a business owner.

It's up for you to decide how that is, whether that's teaching other people your skills, whether that's just doing the exact same thing but finding your own clients, or pivoting slightly and using your skills for another business under the same trade or skill that you currently have.

So that's me, this podcast is going to be all around the theme of starting a business what sparked people's ideas, what challenges they faced early on, what challenges did they face once they were successful, and from those problems they faced we're going to learn a lot, we're going to learn how to think like successful business owners so that our brainwaves start going in the right direction and we start thinking about how we can start and grow our own businesses.

So, thanks for listening to the first episode and we've got many more to come.