Even though the best time to start a business is while you are at a job, it has its own risks. You have a backup income that doesn’t put a minion of pressure on your startup time lines and you will anyways be busy with your day job. However, the slow pace of your startup will eat up your finance and your productive months.
This overlap would easily go on for 3yr plus until some real heavy external trigger like a job loss or near ones passing away pushes you against the wall. At that point you should have cash flow coming into your business and if not you are already on a sinking ship.
So how to make sure your business is cash generating from the moment your other options are cut in a flash. Its back to basics which is to complete all your homework. That means close your decisions and actual paper works on:
- Do a Private Limited company and nothing else (we’ll talk next week on that and then on why you might need a holding company)
- Name selection for brand and company (ideally both should be different)
- Company formation which includes soul searching on what all your company might do in future and share capital required
- Trademark, domain name registration which is all tied up
- Your website which should be an ecommerce site and nothing else (because any marketing medium should have a friction free payment collection)
- Your physical business infrastructure (product, people, building location in that order)
- All your approvals
- More money than you might think (really worse than what you would end up while building a house)
- Raise as much money from a PSU bank (later on how you would end up taking money up to your in-laws)
It’s a never ending list but like I read, you would see mostly loops and little progress in short term but years later you would understand the distance you moved. So gear up for the most exciting phase of your life, definitely much more exhilarating than your college or PG admission or first crush…well your first job was really easy…but as I believe, no regrets for later.