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John Hagerman

4 REASONS WHY STARTING A SUCCESSFUL NEW BUSINESS IS NOT A DIY PROJECT

The COVID era gave us all more time on our own. We didn’t have all our friends and co-workers around us to help us out with answers, advice or suggestions. We learned to DIY everything. Home improvements? DIY. Home schooling? DIY. Staycation planning? DIY. Why not make starting a new business DIY, too?


DIY can be fun. You learn a new skill. You feel a sense of accomplishment when you finish project on your own. And you usually save lots of money doing it yourself. Win-win-win, right? Not so fast.


Entrepreneurs have learned to take advantage of the forced solitude in the COVID era, and tried DIYing just about everything, including trying to start a business. They’re proud of the hustle and ingenuity, rightfully so. They’ve become Google Gurus at finding the answers they were looking for to business questions. Online forums, videos and webinars promised all the answers felt like master classes on achieving DIY success. But what too many entrepreneurs miss are the hidden disadvantages of trying to do it all yourself. Here are 4 reasons why it doesn’t make sense to DIY everything about your business, no matter how small your budget.


1. DIYing everything can create killer stress. Success is all on you, but so is failure. You work hard to make sure you find all the answers, but what happens when you miss a question you should have asked, and answered? You’ve spent a lifetime dreaming about starting your own miss, if would be sad to lose it all because you missed something. It’s even sadder when it was staring you in the face, but you didn’t see it. Having someone around who can see what you miss, and make the invisible visible to you. It doesn’t make sense to waste time, energy, and a lot of money, trying to do everything on your own. That extra pair of eyes, and shared wisdom, can be the difference between failure and success.


2. Recognize what you’re good at, and what you’re not. It can be easy and fun to learn how to DIY a small project, but there’s nothing small about starting a business. You can quickly research and learn enough to do a project around the house, but there are too many tasks and too many different skills to master when launching a business on your own. Smart entrepreneurs learn to identify what they’re good at, and recognize their own limitations. You may be a master at what you do, but that doesn’t make you a master of everything. Do what you do well, but hire expertise you don’t have. There’s too much at stake to risk it all one a self-inflicted error.


3. There’s nothing more important than getting all your stories right and tight. Branding stories, marketing, web design, graphic design, newsletters, blogs, and social media, are all areas that depend heavily on having the exact right message. They make a huge difference to the success of just about all entrepreneurial ventures. There’s no one who knows your products, your processes, and your story better than you do, but translating all that into messaging your prospective clients/customers can’t resist, takes great execution, not just a big bucket of information. Trying to DIY this most critical area of your new business can be costly. It makes sense to work with someone who can help you clarify and define the foundations you’ll need here to succeed.


4. Your time is your most important, and rarest asset, don’t waste it. Escaping corporate hell should mean you now have more time to spend with your family, enjoying your favorite activities, and having time to explore new things – like starting your own business. But it’s easy to spend 2 or 3 times more hours trying to DIY launch and run your new business, than you spent on the job. By hiring experts for specific jobs, and working with a coach, mentor, guide or advisor, through the whole process, you can create the time to do what you want to do most – change the world with your new business, product, or service. A few key investments up front will free you to DIY what you can, enjoy the process more, and radically increase your likelihood of success.


There’s a lot of areas in starting a new business where DIYing can be smart strategy, but it’s not worth risking your dream on trying to do it all yourself. I specialize in helping corporate escapees, like you, leverage your talents and passion to make your dreams come true. It this makes sense to you, let’s have a chat about what my help my look like for your business.


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