I am still here, it is just blogging took a tenth sit
Posted by Roman on Oct 13, 2008 in RomanZ News |
I been meaning to get back to my blog for awhile, but the combination of my laziness, my family being here for the most of the summer Oh, and working on building my media empire from ground up was preventing me from doing so. A lot of people in my daily life keep asking me if I regret leaving the job and the best question is : “are you making any money out of it.” So this is my update post:
- No I don’t regret leaving my job. Firstly, there is no point in regretting something as you keep looking in the past instead focusing on what is going on NOW with you. Secondly, no matter what happens I am having fun right now and learning things you can never learn in school or by being a sales manager in big corporation. Thirdly, HELL NO I am not missing my daily job. I love the feeling of creating something new, transpiring my ideas into an actual product, meeting new people that are open minded and actually enjoying the life instead of being stressed out all the time.
- Am I making any money. Not really, however I am not planning to be profitable for a 7-8 months. While it seems like a long time it is pretty short for a break even point. As one bestseller business book says: “You got to face the brutal facts, but don’t loose the faith.” Careful planning, planning and planning again along with unconditional believe in a good outcome helps me to manage the fear and work at my full capacity
- Bad economy: that is a big one, even my friends in a big companies are struggling with sales these days. “This is probably the worst time to start a business” my friend said yesterday. There are plenty of advice on what start-up should do in such economy. I will add my two cents: any condition is double edge sword and is in jujitsu you can use the power of opponent against him or her. The opponent being the bad economy, use it for you advantage! Provide a product that helps to your customers to become recession proof. Use their fear to help them spend more with you. Easier said than done, but it is possible and great way to use external factors for your own benefit.
Practical Lessons learned:
- Shopping for a supplier is not an easy task. Finding someone who has great solution and you would like to work with is so hard.
- Hiring sales reps was harder than I thought. Even though I am paying 20% commission (which is at least 5% of any big corporation) it is hard to find the right people without actually having an exisiting product.
- It is all about finding the right people. You need to hire different personalities for your team to be balanced, but don’t hire anybody just because it seems like there is no other choice. I mean wait for the right person, right people make all the difference
- I make 1000 decisions a day now compared to a 100 I was doing before. The best thing is that nobody tells me if they are right or wrong, I have to find it out by myself.
- There are plenty of people close to you that will be very skeptical about your idea. There are plenty of people that are not that close to you, but think that idea is brilliant
- You got to have guts to go with your gut feeling despite what everyone else says
That is it so far. I will post a little bit more practical advice later on. I was choosing for 3 weeks between salesforce.com and zoho.com CRM systems. I really want to share some of my experiences with Zoho CRM since I didn’t find a lot of info when searching.
Overall it is a wild ride where one can check his or her own power of will, discipline and improve from inside or out. As the way of karate says: it is not about defeat or winning it is about perfecting the spirit through vigorous practice.