Starting Your Business

The Multi Tasking Entrepreneur

Written by Jay Shapiro for Gaebler Ventures

Early conditioning teaches us to take small tentative steps, one at a time. Sometimes though the entrepreneur needs to branch out in mnay directions to get the job done. Chaotic or practical? You decide.

Though the thought of doing everything at once sounds impossible, chaotic, and disorganised, it does not need to be.

Many multimillionaires, regardless of the industry, have this one thing in common, i.e. they did everything at once, and as a result made lots of money. With regard to this last sentence let's look at how this can be achieved without having a nervous breakdown or creating havoc.

If you think about how we have been raised, we are taught to do things in steps. First step, learn this, second step, try this, and so on and so fourth until we have a finished product, or learnt what we set out to. This is taught throughout our school life, and the saying, "Don't try to run before you can walk," springs to mind.

The mistake we often make is that we apply this to our business. We feel we should have a business up and running before we start marketing it, and we feel we should only push certain features once another part of the business is established. In these circumstances, all we are doing is holding ourselves back. We should be marketing a business before the business is operational. This has become so much easier to do with the advent of the web. Social media was designed to spread the word, and the word of your business is what you should be spreading, even before it is drawn up. Buy the domain, set up web hosting, and then start telling people about your business. You can never have enough marketing, and would it not be nice to have a few customers the moment you start trading?

The lesson here is to do everything quickly. You are keeping plates in the air and trying not to let any drop. So while you are bringing in a new product range, you are selling another to customers, while one service is being developed, you are bringing in a new infrastructure. Accounts are being created on social networking sites, while you are marketing via another channel. The more you can do the more you will yield.

Though it can be argued that strategies cannot be thought through before they are implemented, you will learn a lot on the job. There is no substitute for experience, and throughout the chaos of doing everything at once, you are gaining experience.

Though you are doing everything at once, there is still time for planning. In many ways, the planning will come into it for all areas of the business, and then they are all implemented at once. You will be extremely busy and will be tested when something unforeseen happens and you have to take time to correct it. Will you have the ability to keep everything going and carry on doing everything at once in the event of this happening?

As you can see, the trick is to plan everything where you want it to be, and then go for it, rather than one step at a time. You're going to be busy, you're going to be stressed, but if you're lucky, you're going to be rich.

Jay Shapiro is a freelance writer based in the UK. Jay has a particular interest in the emotive aspects of the entrepreneur's character. "Alongside the nuts and bolts of business, the character of the person is often the ingredient responsible for success."

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