Start Something

Lesson learned this week: starting your own business is way more difficult than it sounds.

This past week, a couple of my friends decided that they wanted to start an organization to enter cars in to custom car shows. My usual answer when someone starts off on a venture like this is, “well, do you have a website?” After tinkering around on my Marine Corps website for quite some time, I figured it was time to get into the serious business. After all, this is an area where we would hope to make money. In fact, right of the bat, we will be collecting dues from our members. This means it is time to get serious about this really fast. Okay, so, what’s the first step?

Of course, the first step was the name. Not so much the actual organization name, since that was already decided, but the .com name. Luckily for us, our namesake .com had not been taken yet, so that was pretty easy. Next up was choosing how to host it and set it up. Since we’re just starting out, and would like something cheap and simple set up quickly rather than take the time to set up a complex, super-interactive website, we decided to stick with Office Live. Hard to beat $15/year with so many formats already created for you. So we have our .com, and we have our basic setup. That wasn’t so bad, was it?

Mission statement? What’s a mission statement? Well, turns out, it’s a pretty useful thing to have handy. Since this little thing sets the goal and purpose of everything you do, you really want to make sure to start thinking about writing one down. It is equally important not to stray from the mission statement. That is when you start losing focus, wasting time, and either not accomplishing your goal at all, or having a lower-quality product. We are still working on a mission statement, but we’ve narrowed down our focus. Since we only started this week, I don’t feel too bad about not having this done yet, though we should set a deadline for having one at least drafted.

Next up is our logo. Usually this isn’t an incredibly high priority so early on, but I happen to know a couple college graphic artists friends I could tap to help me out, so I decided to take advantage of that opportunity. This is where we learned another lesson. What we might have initially thought was a cool logo idea, might not be cool at all, and either a little childish or far too over the top. In fact, it is probably better to let the artist do his or her job and come up with the design. In the end, this is turning out to be the best option, and is going to yield a far better logo than we initially imagined.

Lastly, we need to make this an official organization. To do this, we need to figure out what we have to do in terms of legally owning our name and establishing ourselves, as well as figure out what to do financially in terms of what to do with the money we bring in and what the spending priorities are. We’ll have a couple meetings to establish this, but for now we’ll focus on building a small team and that pesky mission statement. It should be exciting to see how this goes.

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