Coupled with this faith, you need your idea to go through a bit of a beating. If nothing else, you need to talk to a few people to be sure that you’re not completely crazy … or at least that your idea isn’t. You will be tempted to simply ask your family and friends what they think, but the fact is that they aren’t really going to give you impartial advice – they love you too much to tell you honestly if your idea stinks.
So, you need to try running your idea past some people who have been there and done it before or some people who are inside your chosen industry who know what they’re talking about. You need to find some people who aren’t afraid of hurting your feelings, people who don’t have any kind of vested interest in you or your idea.
This process doesn’t need to take a lot of time and, of course, later in the book we will talk about some of the ways that you can find this critique very quickly. If you can muster up enough optimism to throw yourself wholeheartedly into your idea and also find some pessimists to help bash it into shape, your little caterpillar of a concept might well grow into a beautiful butterfly.
Of course, some of your ideas will be beaten to death by pessimism – and perhaps quite rightly. Never be too pig-headed to change your idea or change your mind. If all the advice comes back as a thumbs-down, maybe consider your other options.
No matter how many ideas you have to go through, the most important thing is that you maintain your optimism. I guarantee that if you do that, eventually you’ll make a start and you’ll graduate from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.
MY START AS AN ENTREPRENEUR
In my case, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, perhaps from an unusually young age. I’m not exactly sure where it started but I was always making things and selling thing to the neighbours.
My earliest memory of trying to make money was from when I was about eight years old. I baked some cakes and sold them to my teachers at school. I sent the money that I made to Greenpeace, my favourite charity at the time. By ten, my entrepreneurial ambitions had grown and I was fascinated by the simple businesses that I came across as a child on the outskirts of my home town of Edinburgh. I visited a local chicken farm with a childhood friend. ‘What a great business!’ I thought: the farmer just has to feed the chickens, they lay eggs, and he can carefully steal them to sell for a profit, without having to share any of the takings with his feathered employees. Bingo!
We convinced the farmer to give us a box of eggs for free, which I took home to my mum and dad and explained that we’d had this brilliant business idea. We would keep the eggs warm so that they would hatch and then sell the eggs that the resulting brood of chickens would lay!
As I’m sure you can imagine, my parents weren’t particularly keen on this business idea – of turning their suburban back garden into a chicken farm! Fairly used to my hare-brained schemes by this point, however, they let us give it a shot, not really expecting two ten-year-old boys could find a way of hatching eggs.
And so we put the eggs on top of the cable TV box under the telly, where it was kind of warm. And, amazingly, three weeks later, four of the eggs hatched into little chickens. The poor things probably thought that Jerry Springer was their mum!
We raised the chickens in the house, gave them names, and soon they were big enough to go out into a house my dad built for them in the garden. Before long, they were laying eggs, which we sold to the neighbours.
Unfortunately, my chicken farming career was sadly cut short one afternoon when the local fox decided to eat the chickens for dinner! I guess you could say that I learned my first real lesson as an entrepreneur – that, at the absolute least, you should look for a business idea that doesn’t have any natural predators!
As I’m sure you can tell by this point, my beloved parents were very supportive of my no doubt exhausting entrepreneurial energy as a child. My interests baffled them, and everyone around us. Neither of my parents nor anyone we knew had ever started a business before – where this interest came from was something of a mystery.
FROM EGGS TO BACON
It wasn’t long before I met an entrepreneur for the first time. One of my high school friends had a job as a ‘bacon boy’, selling bacon and sausages door to door. He told me about how he was paid 30p commission for each packet of bacon that he sold. I was instantly hooked – where could I sign up?
My friend explained that since I was only 12 this would be a problem – I would have to pretend that I was 13. ‘No problem,’ I exclaimed. And so it was arranged that my friend would introduce me to the boss – The Bacon Man, a Mr Alan Bryson. Despite my naïvety and perhaps the insincerity of some of my answers, I got the job, and within days we were pounding the concrete, knocking on doors all over the neighbourhood.
It didn’t take long for me to build up a list of regular customers. I would walk miles every evening after school, proudly wearing my white uniform and always trying to improve my pitch. In the beginning I was selling maybe 20 packets a week, but gradually I found myself close to breaking the 50-packet-a-week mark.
TEENAGED COMPETITION
The Bacon Man published a weekly newsletter for his fifty or so teenaged, spotty sales reps. He would include motivational quotes – ‘If you fail to plan, you should plan to fail,’ that sort of thing – along with a ‘Top 10’ table of who had grossed the most sales that week.
A few months into the job, I found myself published in the top ten for the first time. My sense of achievement was immense – I had grown my delivery route to include all of the well-to-do neighbourhoods in the west of Edinburgh. It wasn’t an easy job and I worked hard at it. I would walk down vast driveways in the rain, only to be told that the owners were Muslim, Jewish, on holiday, on a diet or just didn’t have any money to hand.
Eventually, at around 60 packets sold in one week, I found myself in second place with another boy. His name was Richard Field; I can remember his name to this day. He had beaten me by only a few packs – next week I was resolved to top the charts.
But I quickly learned that he wasn’t going to give up the top spot easily, and so found myself engaged in a spate of competitive bacon selling.
Our weekly totals rapidly touched 80 packets apiece and continued to climb. One week he would have the top spot; the next it would be mine. Eventually, partly thanks to the modest innovation of doing my round by bicycle instead of on foot, I managed to overtake him for good. This competition resulted in an achievement I still feel a twinge of pride over: I became the first Bacon Boy to sell 100 packets in a week!
Impressed by my accomplishment, the Bacon Man asked me to become his new right-hand man. I was 13 years old and nobody so young had been granted such an honour before. The deal was that he’d pick me up from school in his van and drop me off in an area of town I’d never been to. I’d be given an under-performing Bacon Boy and it would be my task to get them up to speed.
What a wonderful job, I thought. And that wasn’t all: I’d be paid the incredible sum of £20 a day. An unheard-of amount among the kids of our playground.
‘Sounds great!’ I thought. ‘No way!’ my parents shrieked. Whether they didn’t like the idea of me wandering through the wrong parts of town in the dark, or were concerned that all this extracurricular bacon selling would affect my studies, I’m not sure, but my parents’ reservations stood no chance against my enthusiasm, and I was soon selling bacon wherever it needed to be sold. The Bacon Man taught me everything he knew. He was truly an archetypal entrepreneur – a man who saw an opportunity and went for it, regardless of how unconventional a business model it no doubt appeared to his friends when he first started ‘The Bacon Service’.
He taught me the basics of customer service. He would