Let’s hit the button on the “Way Back Machine” for a moment today. One of the things we took a great deal of time with as we started up Showcase U is talking about, evaluating, brainstorming and then painstakingly documenting the foundation for the company. This included a well researched business plan and moved to the meticulous aspects of our administrative & operational structure.
This is a difficult discipline to adhere to because when you’re excited about starting up a new company, all you want to do is get going, get it launched and start making money!! But the time spent in these early days being diligent about building a rock solid foundation brick by brick will give you a much better shot at weathering the storms that will inevitably come.
We are a virtual company at this stage as I work from a home office in Michigan, Jake works from a home office in Indiana and Chad works from his laptop in whatever city the Philadelphia Phillies are playing in during the major league baseball season and from his home office in Louisiana during the cold months.
We decided to go with an internet based solution for our email and document creation & storage. We’re using Google Apps and Google Docs and Gmail. It’s free and the document sharing capability has proved to be pretty slick as we all can work on the same document or spreadsheet at the same time, which is a whole lot better than emailing versions back & forth to one another. It also means that we don’t need to invest in a server to house these applications, and when I purchased a new computer last month I saved money by not including MS Office in the package cost.
But the very first foundational action that we took was to create our life plans. When you’re starting up a new company you want to make sure that what you’re working so hard to create will fit within what you want out of your life. Otherwise it’ll become more of a job and you’ll be less likely to give it the enthusiastic energy that it will need to succeed.
Jeff & Rich Sloan appeared on CNBC’s “The Big Idea” last evening to talk about the importance of creating a Life Plan as an entrepreneur. Being a startup CEO myself, I was working & didn’t see it live, but I recorded it & will check it out while eating lunch today (you just gotta multi-task as an entrepreneur). You can learn more about creating your own life plan right here at StartupNation.com.
