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Money Matters: 3 lessons I’ve learned as a small business owner

By Peter Ord - Special to the Daily Herald | Nov 26, 2022

Courtesy photo

Peter Ord

In late 2017, I found myself ready to start my own SaaS company. When I submitted my resignation at my current company, the CEO at the time told me, “You’re not ready. You need the experience in this current role in order to be successful. Don’t do this yet.” 

But I didn’t listen. 

I knew I was ready to take on the challenge of starting a new business. I had grown up watching my father run his own business and had the general framework of what it took to be a successful entrepreneur. I was determined to bring an onboarding platform to the market that would solve the problem of poor software implementations.

Five years later, I can honestly and proudly say, I made the right decision!

Here are three tips I’d like to share with new entrepreneurs who are just starting their small businesses:

Surround yourself with the right mentors

One of the most helpful pieces to the puzzle of starting my own business was the mentors with whom I surrounded myself. In fact, 76% of professionals feel a mentor is important. 

Finding the right mentor is vital to your business’s success. The right mentor is someone who has seen you fail and succeed, knows you more than you know yourself, and sees you for your potential and not who you are in that moment. You also need someone who understands risk and is going to tell you what they think. 

How do you know if someone is not a good mentor for you? If you get offended by what they tell you or the advice they give you, they aren’t your mentor. If what they say upsets you, you don’t really believe they know you, and you won’t listen to what they have to say. If you don’t trust their advice, they cannot be your mentor. 

As one of my early mentors told me when I let him know I was quitting my job to start my own business, “I wouldn’t do it, but I already know you’re going to do it. So drive straight off the cliff with no skid marks. Be all in!” That advice was invaluable, and even though he had reservations about my decision, he let me know he believed in me and supported my decision.

Failure is temporary and not permanent

Just a year after starting our business, I received a FedEx envelope the week before Christmas break. It was a “cease and desist” letter from a company that felt we were infringing on their brand. The letter demanded that we change the name of our company or face legal action. I had never faced anything like that before. None of our board members knew how to guide me through a trademark infringement. I wondered how I would even approach the situation. 

The next morning, I called their CEO. I spoke with him respectfully and shared with him our desire to be as fair as possible. He was flabbergasted that rather than having my attorney call him, I had made the call myself. (I didn’t have the courage to tell him that I didn’t have an attorney.) That call gave us some grace. It gave us the time to work through the situation, and it ended up being a blessing in disguise helping us rebrand under an entirely new name, which has been a far better match for our company.

As a business owner, you will be faced with challenges that you and no one else have faced. If you are willing to run with the punches, you will do OK. Challenges and bumps in the road are the norm. We often compare ourselves to excellence because we believe that it exists in the market. That is not reality. Plan on the mountains. Embrace them. If you are expecting perfection, you will fail. Remember, it’s not the destination: It’s the journey.

Hire the right people

Only 10% of your success can be attributed to your product or services. People are the real reason why an organization succeeds. 

One of the biggest challenges I had early on when building my business was finding people who were up to the task. In that search, I came to learn that there are two types of people that work in a company: builders and sustainers. Builders can take risks and thrive on building new processes and new ideas. Sustainers are those who keep the business running by making sure tasks are completed. 

Find people that are builders. These individuals belong in a startup. Sustainers do not.

As you bring people into your business, your first 100 hires should be kind, optimistic, empathetic, and self-aware. If they match that profile, that will affect the long-term culture of the company. If you get those first employees right, that 100 will help you get the next 1,000 hires and attract those same kinds of individuals. 

As we celebrate our fifth year in business, I think back to those early lessons I learned as a small business owner. Without the proper mentors, the willingness to embrace our temporary failures and hiring the right people, we wouldn’t be where we are today. There is no easy path when it comes to starting a business. Recognize that it’s hard. If you don’t, you won’t be prepared. As Jerzy Gregorek said, “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.” Choose the hard and get to work!

Peter Ord is the founder of GUIDEcx, a client implementation and onboarding project platform based in Lehi.

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