Episode 13: Best Time Part 1

Thinking about starting a business? Now may be the best time.

Why?

Capital exists to fund the right idea for what’s happening now
Culture of support
Great tools to get started

Many businesses – from UBER, to Stripe, to NEST, to Electronic Arts – started in difficult or uncertain times, just as many businesses have been started during good times.

Doug and Glenn are perennial optimists encouraging you to go ahead and try to bring your great idea to life. You’ll never know until you try.

Transcript

Glenn Suart 0:00

When I do all these stories about successful brands, businesses, inventions – lots of them, of course, are old or they’ve been around 20 years, 30 years – it was tough at those times, and much more difficult. Today, there’s lots of great brands that are literally created overnight, and they’re successful because… didn’t take much, the environment allows it to happen.

Doug Ross 0:34

Welcome to Conversations on Startups, a podcast brought to you by Douglas Ross, author of the book, Spark Click Go: How to Bring Your Creative Business Idea to Life, and Glenn Suart, of Today’s Great Idea, a radio series featuring over 300 origin stories of businesses, brands and inventions that have changed the culture. Welcome to today’s conversation.

Glenn Suart 0:57

Today, it’s a great subject – actually really excited about it, because… Why is now a good time or a great time to be an entrepreneur? There’s lots of things that don’t make sense. Oh, I don’t have enough money or the economy’s bad, or this or that. But you know, I think anytime you have an opportunity to try to be an entrepreneur, it’s today, it’s always today. In fact, I came up with you know, the reason I call it Today’s Great Idea was… is that old story about the oak tree. When… when’s the best time to plant a seed for the oak tree? Well, 20 years ago. When’s the second best time? Today. You never ever know what the right time is. You can always wait for it, and think, Oh, there’ll be a better time, but there’s no time like today. Does that make sense to you, Doug?

Doug Ross 1:44

Yeah, it does. I love the idea of building something. And sometimes it’s… it’s a long term view. Your oak tree metaphor, is quite apt from that perspective. I think there’s a lot of things peculiar to today as well though that make it a really great time, such as access to capital. I think that’s fundamental to any business obviously, and there’s a lot of money out there. Doesn’t mean it’s easy to get. And it doesn’t mean you can’t get it… you can get it with a bad plan or a bad idea or a bad team or no progress. But if you have those things in place – there’s money out there in different places to get it. I would chalk that as one of the reasons now’s a great time to be an entrepreneur.

Glenn Suart 2:34

I would also argue, you’re right, that it’s not… it’s certainly more [than] about money. It’s about… there’s a culture now of celebration of entrepreneurs that may not have existed as much 20, 30, 40 years ago. Because the culture at that time back in the 60s and 70s – work for the big companies, you know, security, that type of thing. Entrepreneurialism wasn’t as celebrated. We’re living in a time when you’re encouraged more often – and we do it naturally you and I – encourage people to take advantage of opportunities and do something with them. So, culture is an important factor for sure. What other factors are you… do you think of?

Doug Ross 3:16

Well, I think that there is knowledge to go along with that cultural aspect that you just mentioned… but there’s knowledge of what it takes to become an entrepreneur. It can be broken down into parts that would make it somewhat like a craft. And somewhat like a craft, you may be able to learn it on your own, through books, through apprenticing with others that are entrepreneurs, there’s… [that’s a good point] there are things that you can learn – and like with so many subjects out there – this has been written about and… there’s videos, there’s lots of things out there that make it… break down the mystery, I think.

Glenn Suart 4:03

Ya, no, knowledge is really important. Going along with that, I would think that not just knowledge of subject matters and things but knowledge about business practices, and… and you don’t have to be an expert in everything anymore. There are so many service opportunities… and if you don’t know how to create a website, someone can do it for you. If you need this or that there’s always somebody available. So there’s lots of tools – that don’t cost as much as they used to – available to help you do something with your idea, and be entrepreneurial.

Doug Ross 4:38

Totally agree and things like inventory management systems. Some of these things that for some entrepreneurs – I don’t want to say most, but for some entrepreneurs – they would just not really want to, or have the know-how to build that. For somebody else, it’s all they think about, they dream about, and they’ve made something that can be used by others [yup]. So you’re right, the tools and, you know, I’ve spoken to a couple of college classes on why is now… a good time to be an entrepreneur. And that’s certainly one of the things that they mentioned – were the tools that are out there – software tools that we just mentioned, and also tools for promotion from social media, you just mentioned websites, all the digital tools that we know about, but you can really get your story out there and get your product or service out there in interesting ways to people that… that are interested in what you’re doing.

Glenn Suart 5:40

That’s right, I consider that reach. And, you know, you think about it, you were an entrepreneur before you basically just were in your own little town or whatever. Now your reach is almost the entire world depending on what you’re doing. And, what’s good about it is you could find people, you don’t need a big huge market to create some opportunity, if you can just find the right people – and they might be scattered everywhere – but if there’s enough of them, it might make your opportunity work, simply because you can reach them everywhere now.

Doug Ross 6:12

Yeah, the global aspect is definitely something that was not in place 20 years ago – 30 years ago – and that now it’s absolutely… the world is at your doorstep. It’s incredible from that perspective.

Doug Ross

Hey podcast listeners, we’re gonna take a short break now. If you’re enjoying the show, feel free to invite your friends, remember to subscribe, and if you want to help spread the word leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Each episode of Conversations on Startups focuses on a single topic. If you want to comment on something you’ve heard on the podcast, or suggest a topic for us to cover in a future episode, send an email to:go@todaysgreatidea.com or douglas@sparkclickgo.com. Glenn and I appreciate you and hope you find our uncut and unrehearsed stories, perspectives, and tips helpful. Speaking of helpful stuff-let’s pick up where we left off.

Glenn Suart 7:13

In a couple of previous episodes we’ve talked about some of the stuff you and I have been doing. You’ve been helping entrepreneurs in different cities across North America. I’ve been working the last year and a half, as we talked about, you know, started a cooler business with essentially three other people – now there’s four of us – running this business. It’s exactly right. Why would you start a cooler business now, during COVID? Well, we thought there was a market for… we’re filling a need, number one. We were able to do all these things because of the tools in place. The… the inventory management, as you talked about, the marketing. We’ve created a company with four people that 20 years ago… good luck trying to start this. It’s unusual, and I find it really educational that it’s exactly this… this is a great time to start a business. Figure out what the need is you’re solving – that’s the number one thing, and there’s always needs – if you can solve a need, this is the best time because of all these things we’ve just talked about in terms of tools and dollars and resources and reach. The other thing I guess is because of all that, you can fail quickly, right? You don’t have to be super successful right away. If you find this doesn’t work, okay, it didn’t cost you very much or it didn’t take too much time – you could try something else. Whereas in the past, you might be committed to these things. So I think now is the best time to try anything going forward.

Doug Ross 8:39

Well, you’re very committed if you… in the past had invested in a brick and mortar factory as an example. Or if you had to produce some really large quantity of a product before you knew if the demand was there, fully. So yeah, now you can outsource this sort of thing, almost anything you can think of you can outsource now including manufacturing – so you can contract out your manufacturing. There are whole businesses that do this. And they’ve invested in a brick and mortar, and what you need to do is invest in the design. If it’s a physical product, there could be molding that you’ve got to create, that kind of thing – the whole design of the product but then somebody else can produce it for you to your specs and based on the quantities that you need, and you… you need not have massive loans to build these things on your own. It’s incredible.

Glenn Suart 9:41

Yeah, so it’s like, if you think about it from a risk point of view, then I guess the risk to do things now is much less than it used to be because of all these factors, you know, and you still want to protect… there’s still risk no matter what you’re doing, there’s less of it that makes it easier to mitigate. So therefore it won’t be a disaster if things don’t go well. You can mitigate that and stay alive and do stuff. When I do all these stories about successful brands, businesses, inventions… lots of them, of course are old or they’ve been around 20 years, 30 years – it was tough at those times, and much more difficult. Today, there’s lots of great brands that are literally created overnight and they’re successful because… didn’t take much, the environment allows it to happen. I guess the other thing would be… I would argue too, is you can never wait to be an entrepreneur anyway. So I’m always going to be saying this is the best time ’cause it only gets better. There’s never a right time to start a business. That’s the one thing I get from previous entrepreneurs – you just try and see what happens. You never know, because it might lead you to something else, and then do something else. Sometimes you miss a window. Sometimes you don’t. There’s a window opening that you don’t even know about.

Ben 10:13

You’re listening to conversations on startups with Doug and Glen, thanks for joining us.

Doug Ross 11:03

Yeah, I totally can relate to that – the window, and you may not be aware of it. You think of businesses that may have been started in recessionary times such as something like Uber and you might think, well, it’s not a good time to create a business. I need all this money, I have to design the software. It’s a crazy idea anyway – we’ve got to change the behavior. And yet, a business like that, really, part of the reason it took off was there was a supply of labor that was looking for these sort of gigs precisely because it was a change in the economy and there was… there was a recession going on and people needed these sorts of things. So, there are, I think, really opportunities in almost any time that you have if you as an entrepreneur can be nimble enough, if you see the insights, if you’ve got an idea that you… that you just know – and you’ve talked to people – there’s a need that you’re filling there that may not be so obvious. So I concur with you. Obviously this pandemic is another one. There’s…there’s been many opportunities created out of this that we would not have expected. Try and do work on your house nowadays, it’s just really tough. So there’s a lot of opportunity for a business that would be in home refurbishment. People are investing more in their home so you can do different things in home remodeling, services to people in their homes. People are spending an unprecedented amount of time at home now and that creates opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Glenn Suart 12:45

All right, well, this is a good subject. I think we’re both in agreement – now is the time. So the reasoning why it’s a good time, there’s dollars available, there’s strong culture to support people who are taking advantage and trying stuff, the tools are out there to do stuff. If you can just find a need. and there’s…there’s no shortage of need, you can probably do almost anything today and with with minimal risk as long as you protect yourself still… you should be… a good opportunity to try something.

Doug Ross 13:20

I think that’s a great summary. You can start small and then really test the waters before you go bigger and invest more, so I think those are all great reasons that you’ve wrapped up there. You know, one other reason I just want to put on the table – I know that was kind of a summary of what we talked about – but when I talk to these classes of young people and talk to other entrepreneurs, one of the things that they consistently find attractive about becoming an entrepreneur is the chance to… really… for self expression. It’s self expression in business, and you can get it as an entrepreneur to a much higher degree than you’re going to get that in a corporate environment. That’s a reason – maybe a perennial reason but it still applies to today.

Doug Ross

Conversations on Startups is a production of Glenn Suart and Douglas Ross. We hope you’re having fun listening but mostly that you take action on your business idea. For more inspiration visit our websites: todaysgreatidea.com and sparkclickgo.com. Another episode of Conversations on Startups will drop soon, or is already available to binge. Thanks for joining us, and remember to subscribe and invite your friends. See ya next time!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai