After three decades as a business journalist, John Thornhill decided to roll his sleeves up and get his hands dirty by starting a business.

Why? Call of the wild? Major cultural shifts? Google Trends showing more people searched for how to start a business than how to get a job?

For John, turning a draft business plan into a viable media company over three years has been the most exhilarating, unnerving, frustrating and rewarding endeavor imaginable.

If you’re wondering what it’s like to launch a new business, John shares seven lessons learnt along the way.

1. Execution is all

Ideas are worth nothing if they remain just ideas.

What distinguishes success from failure is rarely the quality of the idea itself but how well it’s executed.

Stop dicking around, waiting for the right moment to start. Just fucking do it.

2. The market is boss

When you work in a big company, you need to please your boss.

Whether or not you climb the corporate ladder often depends on how well your words and actions rhyme with your boss’s narrative rather than the results you achieve.

But when you launch a startup, you don’t have someone above telling you what to do. The only judge of your performance is the market and whether enough people are prepared to pay enough to keep you in business.

3. Find fellow travellers

No matter how good your idea or how brilliant you think you are, no one can build a business by themselves.

You have to find people who share your vision, complement your skills and implement your plan. If you don’t have management experience and expertise, look for a co-founder who does.

Create a work culture that’s enthusiastic, hard-working, critical, challenging. Seek radical candor and blunt honesty to save you from your biases.

4. Treasure patient backers

Trying to persuade smart and busy people to invest in your idea is a humbling experience.

It can also be a complete and utter waste of time. Venture capital investors are obsessed with maximising the opportunity, not minimising the risk. Despite all the fine-sounding patter about helping founders put a dent in the universe, their only concern is to shoot for a 100x return on their investment.

Instead look for a pool of smart and interested angel investors who are keen to see your idea flourish and ready with advice with no desire to micromanage the business.

Better yet, dial down expectations and seed growth from cashflow without losing equity or taking on debt.

5. Learn quickly from mistakes

You don’t need to know all the answers when you start.

The core methodology of a startup is experimenting, and failing, fast. If you’ve only got seventy percent of the answers, that’s probably good enough.

You’re going to make a lot of mistakes. You’re going to hire a lot of wrong people who aren’t right for particular jobs. That’s cool because that’s part of the process. All startups are a trial-and-error game.

Repeating or not learning from your failures? That’s fatal.

6. Happiness is positive cash flow

No amount of customer love or public acclaim for your product counts for more than hard cash.

Unless you can generate sufficient revenue — or keep raising funds — you’re going to spin out of control and crash, burning money all the way down. If you can’t meet your financial obligations as well as plan and pay for the future, you’re bust.

Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is reality.

7. Water on granite

Expect nerve-shredding moments where you’ll question your sanity.

Stay humble, keep your eyes on the prize and never stop telling your story to anyone who’ll listen. Tell it over, and over, and over again until you wear them down.

Creating a new business only ever happens one small drop at a time. Yes, the process can resemble Chinese water torture. But there are few activities in life more rewarding than turning a burning idea into a reality.

As an entrepreneur, there’s really ony one thing you need to do.

Never, ever give up.

References

“Seven lessons from a late-starting entrepreneur” Financial Times (2022)

“7 Smart Small Business Tips for Older Entrepreneurs” US Chamber of Commerce (2022)