episode 1 have you got what it takes to start your own business
welcome to the be your own boss podcast the young entrepreneurs guide to starting a
business whether you're thinking about business for the first time or you have
an idea that you want to develop then this is the podcast for you I'm Mari
and I'll be guiding you through this 15 part series that will keep you on track
and help you think through the challenges that come with starting a
business, part of the Welsh Government's business Wales service Big Ideas Wales
raises aspirations and supports young entrepreneurs ambitions for business
part funded by the European Regional Development Fund Big Ideas Wales
supports young people through online resources, business skills workshops and
one-to-one sessions with an advisor to help your ideas become a reality
to get in touch with us you can like and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and
Instagram message us and one of the team will get back to you call us via the
helpline on 03000 6 03000, live chat on the
business Wales website or you can email us bigideas@gov.wales I wonder
how many of you have got a good idea or want to start your own business and
they're asking the question can I do it you are not alone lots of young people
dream of becoming their own boss and have ideas for their own business with
many starting the journey right now you're probably not solely driven by
money are you maybe you have a passion something you love to do that can be
turned into a business or a brilliant idea bouncing around in your head maybe
you have a desire to create the life you want and build something you can be
proud of there are some sweet benefits to starting your own business while
you're young have a listen to our toffee acronym and see if they apply to you
T is for time you're young so you've got years ahead of you to build a successful business
O is for optimism it's your idea and you believe you can make it work
F is for freedom you don't have anything
holding you back so why not start today F is for flexibility you're prepared to
try something new and take risks E is for energy it's your business your
idea so you want to put the hours in E is for enthusiasm you imagine your end
goal and have the ambition to succeed did you know that 70% of working 16 to
24 year olds say that they would like to be their own boss at some point in the
future so why don't you join them and start now there are so many reasons to
work for yourself it means you can make the decision the ability to manage your
own time remember it will be your idea your dream and no one else's so you can
control the outcome if you work hard then the rewards are all yours working
for yourself means you're in the driving seat of your life you are in control and
the career you want is in your hands remember though it won't be plain
sailing and there are some things you should consider before you get started
your earnings will be irregular and not guaranteed like they would be if you
worked for someone else there won't be a regular salary if you're ill or on
holiday then you will have to sacrifice your pay because there won't be any
don't forget working for yourself doesn't necessarily mean working by
yourself but you may find you miss out on the
office social life another important thing to consider is that the rewards
will be great but you will need to put in long hours
to achieve them if you want to be successful you need two things
passion and persistence successful entrepreneurs are often described as
being passionate about their business it's all about the emotional investment
and believing in your idea a hundred percent being enthusiastic is important
and this can be infectious which draws people to support and buy from you
always remember nothing comes easily in business and no one gets everything
right the first time it's okay to make mistakes be prepared to make them but
also be ready to learn from them you're young make and learn from your mistakes
now be determined be persistent even when there are setbacks so you may be
thinking "so when should I start?"I think now is as good a time as any starting a
business is a step-by-step process and there is no better time than now to take
the first step one of our business role models Steve Dimmick
founder of Doopoll gave us this great piece of advice "Start your business now
don't wait until your course finishes or for when every little piece of
paperwork is in place believe in yourself and in your idea start now
I sat down with Steve to discuss how he took the first step into starting his
own business and how it has evolved from there.
Mari: Hiya Steve
Steve: Hiya
Mari: How you doing?
Steve: Really good thank you, really good
Mari: Good Good
Mari: Tell us a bit about your story then your business
Steve: cool so hello everyone I'm Steve Dimmick I am
chief commercial officer at Doopoll D double o P o Double L we're a cardiff
based company and we run online surveys
Mari: where did you get this idea how did it all start?
Steve: Good question Mari we got this idea when
clients in our old business which was a design agency ultimately a creative
communications consultancy messed us around we would deliver a project on
time on spec on budget and they kept coming back to us after we'd done
everything that we had committed to and they had asked of us saying can you just
change this one more thing can you I've showed it to someone else and they
wanted us to move this around or change the website or update the brochure and
we found it really really frustrating because we were only a small business
and obviously time is money and we'd moved on to the next project
so it was taking us off the new projects we were supposed to be working on so it
wasn't very cost effective and it was really kind of disruptive and so the
idea was how can we engage with everybody in an organization rather than
just the people that we get a brief from how can we get feedback from the entire
business so that if somebody says or can you change this in the brochure we'll
say well no because 82% of your business think that it should be exactly as we've
presented it so it was a an idea that was created to solve the problem
and I think that's always the best type of business to start is one that
actually solves a problem and isn't just a nice idea
Mari: and something that's affecting your life or you've come across something you
think this would be much easier if this existed
Steve: Yeah of course so they you know
we were one small design agency there are hundreds probably well thousands tens of
thousands of design agencies and they all complain about the fact that clients
move the goal posts after a projects finished and so our thinking was well if
it's right for us and there's a good chance can be right for a lot of other
people so this is going right back this is four years ago now yeah and we yeah
that's kind of where the idea started
Mari: How difficult was it to turn that idea into a business?
Steve: good question again, so it was initially
okay this is a really good point so I'll spend a little longer on this, creating a
business is a very different thing to creating a thing so we set ourselves
the target of creating a prototype a working version of this piece of
software it was just a website basically and we met on the Monday morning in cozy
Club in the middle of Cardiff on the Hayes my chickenpoxed three-year-old
daughter of two year old daughter was with me and we sat down and we decided
right this is what we need to achieve is something that will we'd be able to send
out to people and everybody in the business will be able to respond so we
sat down and we cranked out some ideas and then Mark and Sam are two
co-founders at Doopoll set about coding and designing and all of the great stuff
there that I have very little idea about even four years on and I set out to finding
people that would be up for coming to our launch our big launch of this
brand-new product which was going to happen at Friday lunchtime so we built
the first version of Doopoll in four and a half days
Mari: Wow
Steve: So it doesn't you don't have to take forever to get something done and I
don't get me wrong this is like yogurt pots and string it was what there's so
many funny stories about this when we released it and showed it to people in
the room at the launch we had never even tested it
so the first people to ever use do poll were the people that were there and it was
only literally in the moment when we were asking them to use it that we
realized heck you know what we done this this is probably gonna go wrong and one
of the things we realized that we hadn't done was limit the number so it was all
numbers on the screen and it was percentage response so one person voted
and an answer went to 100 percent another person voted it went 5050 and
then a third person voted and it went 33 to 66 but we we hadn't limited the
numbers so on the screen it was a projector it was like thirty 3.3333
and it went all the way off the screen basically and so across onto marks face
who was stood next to the screen so a little bit cringe-worthy and just but
funny we were laughing about it and but what was great and why this is a great
way of doing it in the room as people were answering one of the key selling
points of Doopoll is it's real time so you can feel the impact your answer is
having so literally you press an answer on your mobile and it changes on
the big screen and they were audible gasps so we could hear people go in like
whoa and cool and straightaway there's just that I think an entrepreneur can
feel it you can just sense it in your gut of this magic there there's something
there that people haven't experienced before and and that one even now like
four years on you probably see it in me I I still remember that vividly and it
makes the hairs on my arms go up is that yeah that magic when you see you've got
something and people are excited about it there's it's really cool and a really
cool thing and a really great reason to run your own thing
Mari: yeah so it's just
thinking about that thing isn't it that thing as you said that people need and
that doesn't already exist so that birds you have there was knowing there's
nothing quite like this yet
Steve: Yes a little bit
I guess I don't agree with the it doesn't already exist so my example you
would be Apple you know Apple have sold billions and billions of iPhones now but
when they created the iPhone there was already you know walk men it
was already mobile phones they were already cameras and whatever else was
there in version one they were already calculators but Jobs and Co were the
first people to bring it all together so it's not like they reinvented the wheel
they just made the wheel a bit better make sense so generally you don't have
to invent something you don't have to come up with something that's absolutely
brand new you can make something quicker something smaller or bigger something
faster something tastier something more exciting then there's still a market for
it don't think that you have to come up with something unique is it's it's
bloody hard
Mari: Yeah, yeah, thats really good advice,
so when did it go from this first launch to being your job and your business
Steve: Cool so this is a thing of something really important for people to
think about I don't think that you have to go all in you don't have to quit
whatever you're doing whether you're you know stacking shelves is the most common
thing or whether you're working as an intern or got your first job as a
graduate whether you're delivering papers or whatever it might be
don't stop doing that would be my advice work on something work on the thing as
an evenings and weekends or lunch hour or whatever you can get away with work
on it in your spare time until you get traction so what they mean by traction
is paying customers it's no good having friends or families say wow that thing
looks great Steve well thanks and and ultimately you know they always gonna
say that what do you think of this thing that I've spent the last six months
making yeah it's fab what is it you know so your friends and family are the best
Liars on earth and you can't trust them so especially when it comes to something
that you're enthused about so get it out there if you can persuade other people
that you've never met before to pay money for it then that's when you've got
the seed of a good business and that's what we had so our first ever paying
customer I was Swansea University's School of Management and they paid us a
lot of money to get a really really early version of Doopoll and it blew us
away and from that you know I don't want people to get carried away but that
ultimately gave us a valuation on the business when we took investment six
months later of a million pounds so a single deal and then the pipeline of
potential other deals made us yeah or made investors trust that we were
already worth a million which still blows my mind
Mari: You make it sound like
quite a smooth journey have there been any obstacles or what what have been the
main challenges that you've faced
Steve: Okay um it's not smooth really so do not get
in for the easy ride do not get in if you think it looks cool you should you
should get into this if it's burning inside you if it's literally like you
can't choose to do something else and I think that that will you'll know you
just have to listen to your inner voice and yeah if you're doing a job a dead-end
job and you go in and it's it's just there because of the salary it's great
advice I got when I was in and I worked in London after graduating and my old
manager in London told me that there's the three worst drugs on earth or the
three most addictive drugs sorry on earth a caffeine nicotine and a monthly
salary and getting off a monthly salary is the toughest of them all it's it's so
addictive because you're there you've got your rent to pay and you know your
nights out with your friends and whatever else but yeah you shouldn't you
shouldn't get into it for the easy ride because it's so exhausting and it's so
at times demoralizing you know you go into something you're certain it's going to
be a deal you're certain that it's something's gonna fly and then it dies
and you don't know why and if you get as you get better you find out why it
didn't work but at the start yeah you're clueless and yeah there's a lot of
people out there that will admit this when you kind of really confront them
but they still don't know what they're doing
most entrepreneurs are making it up as they go
Mari: Winging it a bit
Steve: Yeah absolutely winging it
you get a bit better at winging it you realize you can't wing it so admitting
that you don't know is a really like big learning curve and for someone like me
that's super hard I still I still wing it probably more than I should but then
sometimes winging it forces you to evolve yeah so you say okay we can do
that and then you go back to your team and say hey I've got us a deal awesome
but we need to build this like what there's no way we can do that by this
date and you know sometimes it comes off sometimes you have to call people back
and say oh sorry I misjudged this
Mari: It sounds like the highs are extremely high
and the lows are very challenging
Steve: Yeah I'd say that's that's a really good
appraisal and I what I would say though is the middle ground is it's better than
being in a dead-end job
Mari: what's the main piece of advice you'd give a young
person who's dreaming of starting their own business
Steve: So the number one piece of
advice for me is always why haven't you started already? start, just do it you
know just get it out there we build a prototype in four and a half days you
can you can sell your first version of whatever it is to somebody and ideally
that shouldn't be someone you know but if it is that's that's cool but stop
coming up with the excuses because they will be excuses they'll be excuses and
they're mainly fears that they're fears that it won't work so my advice is just
start and you will say oh well I've got to finish my degree or I haven't finished my
a-levels but if that idea is any good you can do
it you know you do it on the weekend you now people listening to this do not
realize how lucky they are yeah so I don't want to sound like an old codger
but 20 years ago I had my first job out of university and we had to take it in
turns to go on the internet computer and that was like they won't even know what
dial-up is so dial-up is this thing that you had to like wait for a single crappy website
to load you literally have a computer I don't know hundred maybe a thousand
times more powerful than the internet computer that my
entire office used to rely on in your hand in your mobile phone yeah and so
there's never been a better time to start a business
Mari: Thank you very much Steve
if that doesn't motivate you I don't know what will.
You can find Steve's role model profile
and others in your area on our websites go and check
them out stay tuned for episode 2 when we'll be
discussing the steps to coming up with an idea for your business and over the
coming weeks we'll be looking into a range of topics from funding and market
research to business plans and pricing we've got everything you could possibly
need to start your own business and if you've still got questions you need
answers to then get in touch to get in touch with us you can like and follow us
on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, message us and one of the team will get
back to you call us via the helpline on 03000 6 03000
live chat on the business Wales website or send us an email bigideas@gov.wales
I'll speak to you all again very soon