—
Think you need a ton of funding to start a business? Think again. Many successful entrepreneurs never took any funding when starting and growing their companies. Today Filip Boksa, co-founder of BookingKoala, will give us a few tips on starting and growing a business without any funding. Boksa started a cleaning business when he was 19 years old, and within three years, he and his partner grew the company to over 5 million in combined revenue. Then later, he started BookingKoala, which today has thousands of entrepreneurs using it worldwide. Boksa and his partner started with a combined investment of $6,000 which means Boksa started his entrepreneurial journey by only investing $3,000 when he was 19. Since then, he never took any outside capital to fund his businesses, and he says he never will despite getting emails and calls from investors daily. Let’s learn how to start a business in 2022.
What’s the most important part when starting a business?
According to Boksa, three critical factors go into starting a business. You need commitment, execution, and a good plan when starting and building a successful business.
Commitment
It all starts when you get the idea and decide you’re starting the business. There should be excitement, and you should know that you’ll give it your all when you start your business. If you’re half in, you’re not going to make it very far because you’re not going to execute, and execution is important (more on that later). Starting a business is like going to school, being married, or raising a child. If you’re not committed, there will be more issues, and the chance of success decreases. For example, when going to school, you should know if you’re going to get A’s or you’re not all in, and you’re just going to get through the classes. Boksa says that when he started college, he knew before ever attending a class that the goal was to get B’s and A’s, nothing lower. His plan was already established, and he knew the level of commitment he was willing to give to his studies. When he started a business, his goal was different, he wanted to go as far as possible, and his level of commitment changed. He was 100% committed and was willing to sacrifice everything to keep building his business.
Execution
The next step after you commit, he says, is the easy one which is execution. It’s strange becomes most people say that the idea is always the easy part, but the execution is the hard part. Boksa says that’s true, but it’s only accurate when you don’t commit. If you commit, execution becomes easy because you wake up every day motivated to knock out the tasks that need to be done to attain your goals. That is why being committed is so essential, and through execution, you get to see if you’re actually committed.
Boksa says that he was going to college full time and working for his dad full time when he started. It wasn’t until later when the business began to take off, that he dropped both college and work to focus all his efforts on his business. Even though he was juggling multiple things simultaneously, he kept executing every minute he was free. Whenever he was at work, he would step away to answer customers or help out whenever something needed to be handled. When he went to college, he responded to customers in his car before going into the building for class, and the moment he got back in his car after class, he answered any missed calls and emails before he drove off-campus. He says things like that is how you know you’re committed and that you’ll go far in business. Commitment leads to execution which later leads to success.
Good plan
The last of the three is having a good plan. You can’t blindly execute without having goals, and you need an excellent strategy for achieving those goals. Boksa says that everyone’s first goal should be to replace themselves in the company. He doesn’t mean that you won’t ever work again, but he believes it’s crucial to free your time by replacing yourself entirely. When you do that, you free yourself from the daunting tasks that are required but at the same time burn you out if you do them long enough. There should be someone handling customers and other daily daunting tasks while you’re free to work on your ideas. From that freedom and those ideas, breakthroughs will come. If you’re doing daunting tasks all day long, you won’t have the time to focus on things that will improve your business, so a big goal is always to replace yourself within your company. Until then, you do something that gets you there, like focus on generating your first $1,000 in profit per month, then $2,000, then $5,000.
—