Business Is Simple!

How starting a home-based business is simpler than you might think

Hello everyone, and welcome to mikesouthon.com!

I have been an entrepreneur for over 40 years and am co-author with Chris West of The Beermat Entrepreneur, one of the world’s most successful business books, with over 100,000 sales in many languages.

I am here to tell you ‘How to Turn Your Good Idea Into a Great Business’, as it says on the front cover. And we both stand by the title of this article: ‘Business Is Simple!’

It may be long hours and hard work, but I strongly believe that “if you love what you are doing, you will never do a day’s work in your life”, which has (probably incorrectly) been attributed to many people, including Confucius and Thomas Edison.

I always ask entrepreneurs the first and most important question: why do you want to start a business? All the answers are correct: to make some money, to make the world a better place, to avoid working for a tyrant boss, and many more.

Maybe you are out of work. Maybe you have a job but find it unfulfilling. Maybe you just want to help people. All you really need to succeed in life (in my opinion) is a word I use all the time: ‘gumption’. Please go into the Artificial Intelligence (AI) search engine of your choice and look it up.

Is that you? If you are lazy and would prefer to ‘doom scroll’ for the rest of your life, I am afraid entrepreneurship is not really for you. But if you have got this far, then help is at hand.

I will be starting with the very basics, then taking you on a step-by-step journey, where nothing is ‘rocket science’. Entrepreneurship is only about doing simple things well.

My mechanism for helping you is to give you simple ‘calls to action’. My first one is all about finding out about yourself, definitely the most important of all human studies. You can do this immediately by completing the free test on my site, which asks you: ‘Are you a Magnet, Maker or Monitor?’

In our book we simplified business into three key roles: Sales, Delivery and Finance. Each of us is good at one of these tasks but needs to work on the others to build the complete set of skills an entrepreneur needs for ultimate success.

Please take the test and tell me what you think, at mike@mikesouthon.com.

Of course, you will face challenges along the way: you may not relish the job of sales; you may become frustrated by difficult customers or co-workers; you may not understand or enjoy finance (my own personal weak spot).

But I am here to help, with a combination of simple and systematic advice, as well as case studies of people whom I know personally. They have all taken your journey in the past, and are now in a Very Happy Place.

You will be starting out on your kitchen table and may never decide to have a formal office. If you are delivering value to people nearby, are fundamentally profitable, and have repeat customers, then you are an entrepreneur. The rest is detail.

I have a special name for such people: Local Heroes. They are loved and appreciated by their customers, who are happy to pay a fair amount for the services they receive.

But one important word of warning:

Do not, under any circumstances, pay any money up front to ‘marketing experts’, especially social media ‘gurus’, until you have achieved some repeatable profit.

Unscrupulous suppliers will make huge promises, happily take your money, and then say the lack of results was your fault. I will be talking about how to find reputable suppliers in a future article.

And my final tip: do not bother to write a business plan, for now. There is no point. The costs may be accurate, but your projected revenues will be fiction, often ‘wishful thinking’.

If you have a service and you have proved yourself, you are perfectly entitled to ask for money up front, by providing a convincing case study as proof. Your first customer is the hardest, then it gets much easier. I will show you how to do this.

This approach to business goes back to what happened to me in 1984. Two of my university pals happened to be experts in a (then obscure) computer operating system called UNIX. We had all been working for a recruitment company delivering training courses, but decided to leave and start up on our own.

I was told by our Monitor (Finance Wizard) that I had to sell £10,000 of training in the first six months, or we would go bust. On our first morning, I called up a happy customer from our old company and sold them a couple of brand-new expert courses, to be delivered in seven weeks, for money up front. I told them the price was £10,000. This is how we kick-started our business, and it remains the basis of my sales model to this day.

Five years later, UNIX had built The Internet and The World Wide Web was on the horizon. We had satisfied the main criterion for business success, which is ‘to be at the right place at the right time’. We had 150 people and sold the company to a very large organisation for a tidy sum.

You may have a more modest ambition, which is to pay off your mortgage and provide a good quality of life to your family. This is absolutely achievable if you have the gumption.

I hope you get all you need to start your home-based business from my free articles and free case studies.

If you would like the reassurance of getting top-quality face-to-face advice from a real human being, I offer free monthly ‘Beermat Mondays’ in my local pub, The Old White Bear, New End, Hampstead NW3 1LJ. Details are on the Events page. There is no booking system, just turn up. See you there!