Looking to create a new business? Read these tips from an award winning entrepreneur

With the announcement of mass job cuts in banking jobs this week, there’s no denying there’s lots of bad news around in the employment market.

There’s also no denying that losing your job can be traumatic.

If you’ve lost your job, it’s highly likely that you’ll move through a cycle of grief starting with denial, anger and depression. Your sense of loss can be compounded by the fact that it can be so unexpected. While nobody really still thinks that they have a job for life, people in permanent jobs do have an expectation that they will chose the way their job ends, not the other way around.

Making this situation worse is what’s waiting when people start looking for a new job.

Many people do not realise just how much the employment market has changed. Part-time, casual and temporary jobs and independent employment arrangements have been increasing markedly for the past 50 years. Given the high cost of labour in Australia and the trend towards “offshoring,” it’s highly likely that if you are over 50 and unemployed, you may never work in one full time job again.

All this is a very gloomy way to introduce my next blog guest, and actually someone whom I am very excited to have interviewed. Meet Craig Deveson.

Why am I interviewing Craig?

Craig is a former client of mine and the CEO and Co-Founder of the newly launched Cloudsafe365. Prior to launching this business Craig established and led a business called Devnet to become the first business in the world to secure an exclusive cloud application development partnership with Google. Highly successful, Devnet experienced year-on-year growth of 200% and won multiple business awards including a listing in the BRW Fast 100.

In this economy the entrepreneur or people who are entrepreneurial about their careers will be the survivors. When Craig mentioned he was launching his new business I thought it was a great opportunity to find out what he’s up to and to ask his advice for readers of my blog who may be facing job execution, and wondering if they have what it takes to start a new business.

Here’s a summary of what he told me:

Tell us about Cloudsafe365.

Cloudsafe365 is a simple to use WordPress plug-in that provides automated online backup, security and content protection for websites.

Why do people need it?

With increasing numbers of people using the cloud there is a greater demand for these sorts of services like Cloudsafe365. Website owners want to make content as available as possible. Yet in doing so they make content available to unscrupulous competitors and content stealers. They can readily scrape and use products, parts, price lists and directories.

Why you have established this business in this market?

Having worked in the cloud space with Devnet and Google for the past four years, I’ve seen that cloud is the way of the future. I saw the change take place years ago with people like Google, Amazon and Facebook leading the way.

More and more people are using cloud technology in a trusting basis. In social media platforms they put lots of trust in the cloud. They don’t know how their information is used. There is lots of network security established such as firewalls, but very little application security.

We are working initially with WordPress sites from the single person to the million dollar corporations. There are 60 million WordPress sites in the world.

There is a huge demand and need for this sort of service, as more and more of the world goes to the cloud.

Everyone it seems, has an idea for a business. When you start a business, how do you know if it’s a good idea?

There are two types of businesses – a lifestyle business and a growth business. It is much easier to build a lifestyle business. To build a growth business you need to look for things you can scale, or something that has a unique feature. You might need to be first second or third in a market segment or carve out a niche in a worldwide market.

Questions you need to ask before looking for people and backing include:

Do you need to invest in systems for it to grow, or do you need to incrementally add people to grow. Is there a close relationship between what you do and the income you earn? Is the cost structure not much difference between one customer and 100 customers?

Do you have the ability to minimise operations and marketing costs to achieve high margins?

What do you need to be successful in business?

I had an inherent need inside me to give it a go. I had the confidence to sell and market things and an ability to make customers happy. That’s a good basis to build a business.

Can you learn to be entrepreneurial or is it natural?

It’s both instinct and can be learned. Some people are just great operational people and others build things. You need enough instinct to be a builder. Then you need to be resilient and understand that you will scrape your knees when you fall.

Do you need to fail?

Absolutely.

When you think you have a good idea, establishing that idea will always take much longer than you envision. You have to make a series of mistakes to get the product up. If you get it up too early you will have a major fall in time. Mistakes help you refine your product and your business model.

Consistent learning makes the difference between success and failure.

What have you learned along the way?

By going through danger you learn confidence and survival skills along the way. If you are not in that situation you will never learn survival skills.

Readers of interviewiq.com.au can download a free version of Cloudsafe365 for the WordPress website from cloudsafe365.com

Tagged as: career change, Owning your own business, tips for the unemployed