Are we entrepreneurs now?
For both me and Katy, the idea of becoming entrepreneurs is new. We’ve spent our careers in corporate roles across various industries including retail, utilities, local government and financial services. We’ve never had to worry about getting to the end of the month and not being paid, and as HR professionals we’ve never had to think about winning business.
You won’t be surprised to find out that for us, setting out on our own and doing all the things entrepreneurs have to do is pretty daunting. Starting a business is not easy; the website Nerdwallet reckons that 20% of new businesses fail in their first year, and 60% in their first three - pretty scary statistics for us both! With this in mind, it probably also won’t surprise you that we’ve been thinking about what we can do to give us the best chance of success.
In her HBR article 'so you want to be an entrepreneur', Emily Heyward suggests a few principles that might help:
First, identify a problem you feel driven to solve. Katy and I are both passionate about helping people and organisations, and for both of us, it feels like it’s now or never. Couple this with the experience we’ve gleaned from our roles in the corporate world, we think we’re well equipped to be successful.
Second, consider your role as a founder, because people care deeply who’s behind the companies they’re purchasing from. We’ve always thought that HEX is an extension of our personalities and passions, and our business is all about making deep connections with our clients. We hope that because we’ve put time and effort into our personal and professional relationships over the years, people will want to work with us and root for our success.
Third, don’t go it alone. Katy and I are building this business together. As well as sharing the burden of challenges, we can celebrate our successes and use our complimentary skills to do great work. We’re good friends and we trust each other – the only basis for success.
Fourth, determine how you’ll add value to people’s lives. It’s true, there are lots of firms offering similar propositions to us, and we know that many offer them to a high standard. Luckily, we’re confident that we can do work to high standards too. Not only that, we also recognise that often we can partner up with others firms to be even better. Watch out for some of the exciting collaborations we’ve got in the pipeline.
Finally, take the plunge (we wrote a blog post on this the other week). We could have founded our company as a side hustle while doing other jobs, but we realised that the effort and commitment needed to build something special like HEX meant this wasn’t an option.
So here we are - still excited, still terrified, but so far enjoying ourselves! We hope you’ll stay with us and keep cheering us on.
Tom
P.S. We offer a no-obligation consultation completely free of charge. Just contact info@hex-development.com, or complete the form at https://www.hex-development.com/contact.
