Brilliant Start-Up, 2nd Edition

Do a quick risk

audit

step 14

You are now up and running, the business is going well, and

you are over the ‘start-up hump’. You are not out of the woods

yet – it’s time to do a quick ‘risk check’ on your business.

Risk check

We’ve been mentioning risks as we have gone along, mainly

under ‘Hazards!’, but let’s just check you’ve got them covered.

Have you protected your ideas?



You should have registered your designs.



Posted any copyright material to yourself.



Considered a trade mark for your identity.



Completed non-disclosure agreements with suppliers, staff

and contacts.

Done a legal MOT with your lawyers

To cover:



client contracts



supplier terms and conditions



employment contracts.

178 brilliant start-up

Under finance



Got rid of any personal guarantees on your borrowing, or be

within close distance of this.



Have at least 80 per cent of your clients paying within 60 days.



Know exactly how much money you have in the bank, and

this ideally to be equal to one month’s turnover.

Under insurance



Have adequate insurance for your main business assets.

Under sales



Be spending the majority of your time selling.



Have either a ‘sales funnel’ full of at least 14 leads, or a

minimum 5 per cent increase in new sales every month.



Have a price high enough that you lose a small proportion of

your customers.

Under ‘you’



Be enjoying yourself.

Mojo meter: coping when things go wrong

By now you will have had your fair share of scrapes and bumps.

It’s important you realise you are not uniquely rubbish at busi-

ness. If you get slightly more right than you get wrong, I think

you are doing pretty well.

Understandably, people are nervous about talking about their

business failures. But read about great inventors and entrepre-

neurs through history, like Eddison

and the light-bulb, and you real-

ise how many failures they went

through. It’s an inevitable part of the

fail quickly, cheaply and

don’t take it personally!

Do a quick risk audit 179

creative process. The secret is to fail quickly, cheaply and don’t

take it personally!

One of the best bits of advice I got from a mentor was: ‘Learn

crying as a negotiation technique.’ It sounds a bit harsh at first,

but it’s true. If you make a mistake, don’t try to hide from it.

What you’ll often find is that customers become more loyal to

you after you’ve made a mistake. Everyone accepts life doesn't

always go to plan. An early and upfront admission of a prob-

lem, and how you are going to fix it, will often reassure a

customer. There is also little as disarming in life as a heart-felt

apology, and it will usually defuse any tricky situation.

brilliant example

When I started off publishing yearbooks, I used to do all the typing myself.

Finishing a book late one night, I didn’t notice the spell checker had

‘corrected’ the name of the class president, Angus MacDonald, by taking the

‘g’ out of his first name. I shipped the books off to be printed in China and it

wasn’t until the graduation day that someone spotted the mistake.

I was mortified. I grovelled in humble apology. I offered to reprint the books.

I offered to apologise personally to Angus. However, the students just

thought it was funny and I got away with it.