Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

The Big Idea

LW: Okay we'll talk about all of that a little later. For now, we've been asking quite a few small business owners how they came up with their big idea. It seems like you were a little more forced into it than others, but had it ever crossed your mind even before you left your firm to do something like this or to start up your own business?

Brian: I'd always wanted to be entrepreneurial, but I had never really been forced into it. But I think once the opportunity arose or there was a question of whether I would seek employment through traditional methods or actually start my own business and utilize that as a springboard to move forward, there really wasn't a question in my mind. There was a lot of risk involved in that and a lot of unknowns in terms of where my next paycheck would come from, and so there was a lot of anxiety around the first start-up moments. But once I moved past that and kind of understood that it was possible to sustain this business and build up the relationships that we had with some of our clients, then those kinds of worries went away and kind of smoothed out into a better operating environment.

LW: You talked about being worried; I think a lot of small business owners feel similar things. Were there other feelings that you specifically remember when you actually were finished with your job and had decided in your mind that you were going to do things on your own?

Brian: I think it was very scary. That aspect of it doesn't go away even now. There are different kinds of worries but there are plenty of things that are in the small business marketplace especially. We try and deal with clients that are both large-size and small-size, and each one of those clients has different needs and different possibilities, and each one of those puts us in different legal positions and legal risk exposures. And certain aspects of those things could actually have dramatic impacts on us and dramatic negative impacts on us. So there are all of these things that you would worry about as a small business owner until you get sufficient scale behind you that you don't have to worry about those things anymore.

LW: Talking about that specific time period where you were just getting started, is there anything you wish you had known then that you know now?

Brian: I would say that everything takes ten times longer than you could ever possibly imagine. And not through any fault of your own or any lack of planning. But in most cases when you're a small business and you need something quickly, depending on what it is that you need or what it is that you need to have brought forward, others are not as willing to negotiate with you or to deal with you. Just negotiating contracts with our clients or getting services with our customers, those things just took a lot longer than we thought. And I don't know how to tell you to plan for it, but it just does.

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