The 5 Most Important Business Lessons That I’ve Learned In Running My 1st Business

4 min readMay 24, 2016

When I look back at my first business experiences, I have to admit that it was the best business school I could imagine at that time (the middle of 2015). We (as a team) made lots of mistakes, but “you have to break an egg to make an omelet”. Now, I want to sum up that time and share with you some thoughts.

1. Plan your budget.

It’s one of the most important things, but many people don’t spend enough time with proper calculations. We had the wrong view of this part of business, and it caused that we had not enough money to expand. In a few months, we lost liquidity = end of business.

Don’t be romantic about your business (Gary Vee, you were right)!

The margin in our industry was about 6%, so if we wanted to earn 6k $, we have to make 100k $ of income. It’s hard if you have only a few thousand at the start. We were just naive like lots of young entrepreneurs.

2. Separation of Duties is a key to efficiency.

Your business is like a sport team. Think about the best tactic!

If you build your business with a team, you have to read this point precisely. If your partners don’t know what their duties are, it will cause lots of conflicts. What is more, timing is so important. Don’t waste your time for unnecessary disputes or organizational problems.

When we started, we had a big problem with separation of duties. We had only three guys in our business, but it was a lot of issues of competence. Imagine what scale of the problem has big corps!

Because of that, we wasted a lot of time to bring any ideas alive. Don’t make that mistake!

3. Atmosphere matters!

Interpersonal problems should be solved as fast as it is possible.

Unfortunately, I could not reach an agreement with one of our team member, and it caused worsening atmosphere. Nobody wants to work in such a circumstances, so it resulted in a lack of motivation and worse business results. When you are building your business remember to choose partners carefully, to not cause unnecessary tensions.

4. Test your idea before you start.

I’ve heard about this approach several times but did not pay for it so much attention as I should. In fact, before you start a business, you should test your idea and get customers! How? Simply offer the products that you are going to sell to potential buyers. If they are willing to spend money on it, then buy this product in any store and give it to the client. Probably you will lose a few dollars, but it’s the easiest way to validate your business idea.

Part of our offer was the provision for the cafes. We had access to one of the best polish coffees, which you will not find in most warehouses. After many conversations with the owners and managers of cafes, we realized how small their knowledge about coffee is, and that the quality does not play for them the greatest role (unfortunately). We should know it much earlier!

5. Pun on paper your plan

This seems to be trivial, but when you have a million ideas for improving the business per minuteor another brilliant marketing idea but have not made basic things your organization sets in the chaos. Avoid this! Set a plan that helps you to get focus on the most important elements of your business and don’t waste your time to any second-level issues.

Conclusion

I hope that these few issues that I mentioned above will help you during to get the business going and avoid my mistakes. Supposedly an average only one of ten business achieves success, so I must try a few times more to achieve my goals :)