Starting your own small business should be a serious consideration

I’ve also been listening to an audio book Blitzscaling, co-written by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. It’s fascinating.

Blitzscaling is a term for creating high-growth businesses, the kind rarely seen in the UK because they require very large amounts of money to burn. Blitzscaling puts speed at the forefront of purpose, before efficiency or anything else. Blitzscaled companies include LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and Airbnb.

Blitzscaling is the Game of Thrones version of business. You win or you die. There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground. Blitzscaling companies either burn out, get bought out, or dominate the market, it’s a winner takes all. When they win, they change the world.

Now is probably not the time to blitzscale. Unless you’re Zoom, or Gousto, or any of the other companies who happen to have seen the market explode around them in such a way as to flood them with customers and make blitzscaling the only option other than closing the doors to new business.

Creating a novel business model is one of the strategies outlined in the book. Novel business models, like novel viruses, have a whole world to explore. Google innovated a business model in ad words,

Airbnb was entirely a new business model, an almost ridiculous idea, people renting out their homes like a hotel? Then came a downturn in the economy, and people wanted to earn money, and people wanted to save money when travelling, and it became normal. Airbnb has of course been heavily disrupted by CV19, buy hey, it’s all in the game.

From fashionable face coverings to automatic hand sanitiser dispensers to subscription services to online education, everything is changing and change is great for business as a whole.

I was speaking with a book store owner who was thinking about quitting the retail shop and doing a delivery round in a van, or even better, I suggested, a tuk tuk – TukTuk Books, like an ice cream van but books and magazines and if that works out, other products as well. It’s a potentially brilliant little business with no overheads. And it’s easy to test it, to trial it, to run a series of experiments to determine what the market thinks to it.

Given the market dynamics at the moment, one needs to be mobile, to move to the customer, because the customers are less able to come to you. And as local lockdowns pop up it’s a perfect way to stay stable in the otherwise chaotic situation. A lockdown is bad news for a retail bookshop but good news for a mobile delivery service. Change to suit the environment.

There are people on LinkedIn sharing their stories of how they applied for 400 jobs, got two interviews and no placement. Months of disheartening effort. Is it easier to start a business than to find a job right now? You can employ people on the Kickstarter scheme and the Government refunds the wages.

For people looking at redundancy or waiting out furlough, starting a small, part-time business, which can often be done for less than £1,000, should be a serious consideration. Make it mobile first, as in able to move the product or service to the customer, make it simple, local, direct, Covid-proof, lockdown-proof, and come up with something and begin the process.

I know it seems intimidating when you haven’t done it before, but so is getting a job.

It doesn’t need to be a tech company. Try asking a tradesman right now, a painter, a decorator, a builder, how much work they have on. They might be able to return your call sometime around January. Business is a game. Enjoy it.