Can I start a business with no money?
When people ask, can I start a business with no money? My answer is always, Yes absolutely!
But it does come with a BUT…and a few provisos.
What do I need to know when I think – can I start a business with no money?
Anything is possible but it comes at a cost. The cost is either your time or your money and most likely a combination of both.
You asked if you can start a business with no money though, and you can. But be prepared to be patient. Also be prepared to give a whole load of your time. How much time will it take I hear you ask… How long is a piece of string on that one I’m afraid.
Now, I do have some authority on the matter but first let me start by saying…
There is no such thing as an overnight success in business – or anywhere else for that matter.
We can all think of many examples of people who appeared out of nowhere. They seemed to just appear all of a sudden and be the next big thing. Think of a music artist you know who was suddenly everywhere. They probably started off as a busker – Ed Sheeran for example. He spent hours and years of his life practicing his art before he was even busking. It is no different for people in business.
The people who are successful are consistent. They keep working at it when things get tough and don’t flit onto the next great idea. That is the case for most areas of life to be fair. Think of all of the diets out there, in most cases it is fair to say that if we consistently stuck at one thing it would work if we are PATIENT.
Unfortunately we live in a world today where patience isn’t easy to come by. Everyone is busy posting their best life, they don’t post the sleepless nights, the days where it all feels like it is falling apart. They post the good bits so we all feel that they have it different to us. We need to be consistent. That’s what they are doing, they consistently post their good bits.
So you came here thinking how can I start a business with no money, so I’m going to show you
Let’s assume you have no money at all – what do you already have that you can sell? This is how you can start a business with no money. Sell something you already have, then you use that money to invest more in your business and rinse and repeat. You can start keeping some profit back as earnings in time rather than investing everything in stock. It sounds really simplistic but business doesn’t have to be complicated. Amazon started in a garage, just like a million other businesses.
Don’t compare yourself to businesses or people who are much further on in their journey that you are. Unless you are comparing yourself to them at the same stage – THE START or very early.
I always think of product businesses first as that is where my background is, products, manufacturing to be precise. Manufacturing is a great example of a business that can take a lot of your TIME. You buy a raw material (or something that you need to do something to to improve it before you sell it). The markup is higher because you are putting your time and expertise into the product.
But there is of course the service business option. What skills do you have that you could get paid for? It doesn’t have to be anything that you deem as special or highly skilled. People will pay good money to get their time back! That is why there is a booming industry of domestic cleaners and most of them have very little capacity to take on clients.
I’m going to say the P word again! Patience is what you need. Sometimes people are quick to think, I’m not doing x or y. I want to have a proper business. If we take cleaning as an example, there are hundreds of commercial cleaners who started out as domestic cleaners. Also there are cleaning agencies who started off on the tools. They consistently showed up and grew as a result.
If you are serious when you ask can I start a business with no money, you need to know the facts around the challenge you face, mostly if you aren’t realistic.
People say its too hard now – but is it?
They say it was easier years ago, I’m too late.
People have been saying this for hundred of years. The only time better than today was yesterday to start a business with no money. This is because we have worldwide reach for FREE – apart from your time of course but I did tell you that would be the cost earlier.
In the old days – any time from about 20 years ago (ok, maybe a few more but time is going faster than I care to think about). People would have had to put up fliers about their services or deliver fliers to houses. Or reply on printed adverts in newspapers and magazines. Print costs were expensive. If you wanted to flier drop before you had a car it wouldn’t have been a quick job.
Instead we can start a page on Facebook, for FREE. We can set up a Google business listing, for FREE. We can start a following on every other social media platform on the internet, for FREE. See how much easier we have it really. We can take payments from our customers for just a cut of our sale. We can set up business bank accounts without lengthy appointments in banks.
As you start to make some money, then you get to think about where you allocate it to improve your reach and grow your business. That is when it starts to get really exciting. Not easy, you just get different challenges.
Ultimately, can you start a business with no money? Yes!
Will it be easy? No – but nothing worth it ever is!
I’m a big fan of putting processes in place and harnessing the power of Google to grow your business quickly. But you do need to be in a position to get a website to do that to full effect. You don’t need to do it in your first month or year or two.
Most people who start businesses work alongside it, at least part time for a while. Sometimes years. You need to know WHY you want to start a business. If it is to get time freedom, as it is with so many people I know. Please, please know that you won’t get it at the start, especially if you start a business with no money. But it can be a really worthwhile journey in time.
Learn absolutely everything you can along the way and implement what you learn. If you do, I promise you will look back in 5 years and hardly recognise the person you were.
So, what business are you going to start?
I’d absolutely love for you to keep in touch and tell me about your business journey. You can find out more about me too if you want to know more.
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