What to do when you're in your early twenties

If you are under thirty, most likely your parents, like mine, were brought up in the USSR. They studied hard to find a better job and get decent money. And you and I were prepared to become a good worker, although the world around was already different. The Internet took a monopoly on knowledge from teachers, made it possible to get a profession without leaving home and showed us the first young millionaires. We were taught to efficiently exchange our time for money, at the moment when we had other opportunities and other ambitions.

This series of articles should not be taken as a recipe for success, although I give very specific advice. This is more like a message to yourself - seven years ago such an article would change my life. Then I read Kiyosaki and Branson - their example is inspiring, but it is difficult to use the experience in practice. Real estate and multimillion-dollar deals are impressive, but if you want to make hundreds of thousands for a start, I think my experience can help you
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Since childhood I have been a fan of graphics, so by the time I graduated from school I was already working as a designer. There was no clear plan for the future - I just wanted to get better and better. Revenues grew, but to make good money, you need to spend a lot of time. I think everybody has such thoughts - the salary has a ceiling, time is also limited, and I want to be rich and independent. Of course, the idea of ​​his business settled in his head - someday, once. I often hear similar things from designers at the interviews: “I plan to develop, improve, then maybe start something different.” I do not think that an additional incentive or reason is needed to start a business. Who wants - is looking for a way, and in this case, useful advice is motivated better by Shia Labaaf.



I am sure - you can start your own business right now, without loans, bonds and risks. First of all, for the sake of experience. The main condition is to stop directly exchanging your time for money. First, your business may resemble freelancing (self-employment or craft). It's not scary if there is an exit strategy - this is in one of the following articles.

Where to begin

Anyone who plans his business, the question arises - where to start? Can make a social network of a new generation? On the Internet, all the money. Or a coffee franchise? My mother's friend has access to suppliers. Or start a business with a friend programmer? Limitless possibilities make it difficult to move towards the goal.

First of all, give yourself the right to make a mistake . It’s difficult to choose a lifetime business, but you can create a small project and gain experience in entrepreneurship even now. As in an RPG - before fighting a dragon, kill ten rats in the basement. In any case, with the experience of an unsuccessful business, you will become a hundred times cooler than someone who has not even tried.

Evaluate ideas helps elementary planning, on the fingers. While you are just fantasizing, you do not need to download business plan templates and calculate machine depreciation for 10 years ahead. Work in large strokes - for a start, think about profits and the number of sales. By profit, I mean a mark-up on a product or service - relatively speaking, margin. You can often sell with a small markup or less often, but with a big one. And if you can sell a lot with a large margin, you can swim in money like Scrooge McDuck. Do not be wise - rate your ideas as a first approximation, ARPPU or APC will appear later.

Profit from sales * Sales per month = Monthly profit

Profit

If the goal is to make money, surely in your plans to spend less than getting from clients. Why will people pay you? Because you benefit - you have assembled a professional team, simplified your purchase or delivery, produced a high-quality product, are in a convenient place, have earned a good reputation or status. And maybe all at once.

Estimate how much money you have from selling a product or service. Create a table with key indicators, for example:



Reduce all ideas and ideas to approximate figures. For example, in order to develop a website, you need a designer, a programmer and a manager:



It is not necessary to express the markup as a percentage - do as you see fit. The main thing - to reinforce abstract reflections in numbers. Do not expect a profit of 5-10% - in practice, you will pay to attract customers, rent and pay taxes. Work in large strokes and display only the main indicators in which you can easily navigate. Then the table will be overgrown with additional fields and calculations, but first you need to understand the big picture.

Sales

Before estimating the number of sales per month, think once and for all about coverage. How big is the market you are going to enter? No need to examine the reports of leading analysts and count the market to a cent. Just think about who you will sell. Each word in the project description reduces the chances of success - if the service to increase sales interests every entrepreneur, then “an increase in sales of trousers in Omsk at night” will interest only a couple of trouser magnates. At the same time appreciate the possibility of scaling abroad.

From personal experience: Now Log machine makes more than all logos in Russia, although initially the idea seemed too simple to me. But this was her strength - there are no problems with work in Russia and abroad, the service is necessary and understandable. I myself have often become my own client. It is not necessary to have a revolutionary idea - the absence of competitors is more often a minus than a plus.

When you are convinced that there can be many buyers, you need to estimate sales . In the example of website development, we add columns with a profit (we subtract all salaries from the proceeds), the cost of the site (we set the price ourselves, for example, 50,000 rubles) and the number of sales (we divide the desired revenue by the website cost):



Be sure to analyze the result : “in order to make money on developing websites of 75,000 rubles a month, you need to find four and a half clients who will buy the site for 50,000 rubles.” It becomes clear that the idea of ​​developing sites for 50,000 is not very successful.

At this stage it is worth copying a line with numbers and playing variables. And what if the workers are remote? Can raise the cost for a customer? Increase markup? To tie the salary of employees to the number of orders? The main thing, do not forget to pronounce the result: "if all employees work remotely and for free, you need only 10 orders for 100,000 rubles to become a millionaire." Nice, but not realistic.

It is not necessary to make just such a table - you can move downward and build on any indicator, as long as you are guided in the data. You can estimate the number of customers in this way - if you spam for half a day on the Internet, and the remaining time you run around the business centers, knocking on doors and offering your product, will you make one sale per day? If the picture seems realistic, substitute in table 30 sales per month:



Wow - a million in the very first month! Here we must remember that personnel costs will grow multiply and make an amendment. Formulas for calculations should be simple and natural. The main principle is to understand the viability of an idea, you need to estimate the numbers that you consider important. While you are on the beach, fantasize based on common sense . You can calculate the number of customers based on the conversion of the site or find out the average for the industry - it is important that you feel that these figures are realistic. In any incomprehensible situation, assume a pessimistic scenario: not two clients per day, but one, an employee not for 100 rubles per hour, but for 200. Will your project withstand such trials? If there are difficulties with the evaluation of ideas - write in a comment or contact me, I will try to help.

From personal experience: A couple of years ago, when I invented the Log Machine, the reasoning was: “Okay, I'm going to make logos much cheaper than usual, but with clear conditions. Who are my clients? Entrepreneurs. How many are there? Enough. Can I make one sale per day? Of course, I already have clients who pay more, they will like a more profitable scheme of work. Okay, if I make at least one sale every day, I will have about 60,000 a month, and this looks like a normal salary. In this case, I will work on myself. Will I be able to stop doing the design on my own? Yes, when I increase sales. What happens if my assumptions are wrong? I will get experience and come up with a better idea. ”



This table did not give me rest two years ago - it is realistic, simple and clear. Therefore, I invested 8,000 rubles in the first landing page for the Log Machine and started looking for clients. Then everything went not quite according to plan, but more on that in the following articles.

This is the first material from the series on entrepreneurship, I will be happy with comments and suggestions - it is worth writing in more detail, deeply, or so just right. Write in the comments what topic interests you so that I can adjust the plan and write a separate article.

If you do not want to skip the following article, subscribe to the Log machine in Vkontakte (there are still many interesting things).

Good luck to you and your projects!

Text: Roman Gorbachev, Director of Log Machine

Illustrations: Nastya Kiseleva, permanent illustrator of the Logo machine