In this video Argona Partners Chairman, Richard Anderson, answers the question on what the three biggest struggles business' face when starting out. This question was submitted by Dr. Lillian, from Travelusion Tours (https://www.travelusiontours.com).
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Richard:
“I would say the top three main struggles that a business usually has in its first year (as a) startup period would be money, people, and time. Most of the time when you're trying to find money, my suggestion would be, find it as quickly as you can or bootstrap, because most of the time what you need the money for you can still accomplish with the resources that you might not be thinking you have right now. For example, we helped a company bootstrap by just making partnerships with the organizations that they needed the equipment from, and then working out skilled trade and various other kinds of non-monetary exchanges. Those are some interesting ways to bootstrap in terms of money.
People, it's always difficult to find the perfect person for every single job. My suggestion there would be to use your current network, use LinkedIn, and just try to see, you know, when you open up for a job position or you're looking for somebody, leverage your financial situation. So find out, you know, a general valuation for the company that you're looking at based on revenue projections for the next five years, and then try to boil that down into, you know, something like a financial package for somebody that would be compelling, using a vested interest in equity over a certain number of years, in order to have a founder come on board, and still protect yourself in that way as well. So it can get a little bit more complex, but finding the right people is just finding people who are passionate about what you're doing and then trying to give them the right package to keep them around and keep them motivated.
Lastly, with time, I would say good operations are the most important thing here, most of what I suggest would be to use some kind of a Kanban style, some kind of agile style system. I prefer to use Trello. It seems to be, to me the most, personalizable system that we've put together. We can change it and it's free. So again, those are the three main struggles I see, uh, money, people and time, and all of those can be overcome with free solutions and, you know, some creative thinking.”
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