Pep Talk With Dedun: Raising Capital and Advertising Your Business
7:27:00 PM
Yay It's Friday The 13th and it's my birthday. It's been a blast so far. To the blog post, I promised to elaborate on the last point in the previous post, Don’t be afraid to start small. As a student, I don’t expect you to drop all your savings to a business you are not sure will pick up well. Generally though, every business is a risk and you have to be brave enough to take the risk. I also mentioned you should have saved towards the business. Let me explain how I started mine. Will use my cake and hair styling businesses for comparison.
Hair styling: I started this officially in 2009 and it was quite unplanned. Someone just asked me if I could braid and I said yes. Six years later, it’s a big money making business of mine. I didn’t need any capital whatsoever, just my time. Along the way though, I had to expand to weaves. For that I needed needles and thread (basic and cheap tools) and gradually I built my tool collection for hair styling. All I did was invest the money I made to expand my collection.
Baking: Honestly this was also spontaneous. I’ve shared the story many times. I initially started learning just for fun. All I needed was one pan and a hand mixer for tools and for ingredients, they were not pricey at all. When I decided to turn it into a business, I started small with tools, got more pans etc. I didn't have to put all my money into it. When I finally made a good amount of money, I then invested that money into the business and in return, yielded significant profit than when I first started.
Comparing both business, I invested less in hair styling business than I did with the cake business but I can tell you that I’ve made more profit with hair styling than baking. So it really doesn’t matter how much the capital is, if your business can thrive on little to no capital (in terms of money not time), then that will be the best option to start with before you go for the big business ideas.
With these two illustrations, I’m sure you got the point that starting small is the best decision and also invest the money you make (profit and capital) into the business. In a nutshell, you will work for free till you have gotten to a good place. Significant profit will be made after you’ve developed your skills and your clients can see your growth. Don’t put your mind on profit for some months after you've launched your business because you don't have a good client base yet and there’s a lot of growth and advertising to do.
Advertising: Get your brand right from the get go. In this social media age, you can advertise without spending money. How? Do it yourself, after all you have internet don’t you? What’s funny is that I actually haven’t branded my hair styling business but it's making me more money than the cake business. The Irony. I will definitely brand my hairstyling business once I’m out of this country because outside of Hungary, I’m not known as an hairstylist. So please brand your business asap. You don’t even need a logo for now (except you are lucky to have a friend do that for you for free or trade by barter), get facebook and instagram pages for your business, invite and follow everyone but don't just stop there, share on your wall/personal instagram page too. There’s a danger of facebook/instagram page if you limit it to just people that know you, tell your friends to add their friends. Always update your page. If you have friends that blog, ask for features. Eventually when your business has picked up, you can then spend on advertising,pay for a professional logo and always trademark whatever you do.
That’s it for today. Next week, I’m writing about “Launching the business”. I know those not interested in business want me to write about something else but this business talk is a long one. I’m sorry guys. Maybe I’ll chip in a few non business related post before next Wednesday. Off to end the birthday in a grand way.
xoxo
Dedun
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