Testing the Waters, Toe by Toe

After winding up my full time job in Feb, I seriously started thinking about what business I should dive into. I had 4 or 5 ideas in my mind, ranging from Wine Export to an Online business.


I could not do everything at once even though I would have loved to. Thankfully, better sense prevailed. I did not want to spread myself too thin and increase the probability of failure.


Before I jumped into anything definite, I decided to set aside a few months as my "Thinking Time". The whole idea was to utilize this period to analyze what other businesses were doing, understand their pain points and hopefully, manage to avoid those pitfalls myself at a later stage.


In addition to the above analysis, I had to define the skeletal structure of my business. This part was very important to me as the very foundation of my business was going to be built upon it.

Aspects such as

What business structure should I adopt?

Which accounting package (ERP system) should I pick?

How should I manage the record keeping?

What Customer Relationship Management Tool should I use (CRM system)?

Do I start with a simple Direct Marketing Software?

How do I go about building my Web site?

Given the choice, should I go for an Opex or a Capex model?

How should I tackle Scalability from the beginning itself?

How do I go about getting my business plan done?

etc... were just a few of the basic questions that needed to be answered. I had to look at one question at a time even while deciding on the direction of my first step.

There was a mountain of work ahead of me and only so much time.


Read Part 2 - My Own Business - A leap of Faith