How to start business as teenager

anwebservices Level X⁵

September 18, 2016, 5:01 am

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Starting a business is challenging, brutal and can make you want to pull your hair out.

But starting a business is only the first step to becoming successful. The rest lies on a journey filled with perilous and demanding challenges. Here are 5 tips for starting a company as a teenager.

1. Work on your patience.

Patience is a virtue that cannot be overlooked. You must have patience in order to succeed in entrepreneurship. I spent at least 5 hours a day emailing and posting advertisements on various different forums and chat sites to create a team to start my online business.

It was hard work. What you have to do when you feel like giving up is take a step back, envision your goals and get back to work. Also, do not accept everybody who likes your idea. At least try to vet potential candidates before you start working with them.

2. Create business plan immediately.

The biggest mistake I made when I put together a team to create online store was that I didn’t business plan. No one on the team knew what to do for months. People would work on fixing problems only to find out that those same problems already had been fixed.

It is absolutely necessary to put guidelines in place so that everyone knows what they are doing. Without these guidelines, everything will turn into a mess… trust me.

3. Get to know your teammates.

Don’t think of the people working with, or for you, as employees. Instead, think of them as partners or teammates.This will help prevent you from acting like you are above them, which just makes team management a bigger problem.

Spend time with each person on your team. Go out to lunch with them. See a movie. Whatever you can think of that will help you to get to know your team better. If you are running an international team, it is especially important to Skype them. Keeping tabs with people you don’t see everyday is crucial. Learn as much as you can from your teammates.

4. Don’t be a press hog.

The second biggest mistake is to reach out to press before business had even started real production. You want to stay as small as possible until you are forced to become big. If you break out of the gate too fast, you’ll only get too tired and end up last in the race.

5. Learn as much as you can.

A lot of people think that running a (online) business means knowing everything and knowing how to solve every problem. That is one hundred percent not true.

You will learn from your mistakes as from your successes. You’ll probably learn even more from your mistakes. Treat everything as a learning experience and you will be fine. Just remember, never say you know something if you don’t. It will hurt you later on.

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TommyCarey

Building a great team is probably one of the hardest things you'll have to do when starting up a business whether it's a brick and mortar type of business at a physical location or an online business where everything is digital. I've never ran a physical location selling to patrons who come in for what I have, but some of my friends do and all I hear them complain about is their horrible employees lol. I keep telling them that they need to weed out the bad ones and bring in new hires, but they don't want to fire anyone. Now I have ran a digital business for a while now and I'm always looking for credible candidates to come on and help out. I've got a select few people for each type of job I need done and I have them in rotation for the jobs I need completed. If the first guy or girl is busy, I move on to the next person. I'll do this until I have everyone set up and ready to go

A detailed business plan is crucial for success. You can't just go in willy nilly and think you're going to succeed lol

I've seen a lot of people online have great ideas for websites but that's it. They have a basic concept but they don't branch out from that. I really hope they don't think that it will all fall into place when they begin to implement their partial business plan. If that's the case they're going to be pretty upset in a short amount of time.

One thing I'd like to add to your post. You need to treat your new business venture as if it were a baby. You need to be there to protect it when something bad happens. You need to do as much as you can in order for it to grow and be successful. You may lose some sleep over it, but it's all worth it in the end when you can sit back and watch it do great things.

10 years ago