Evan Carmichael advises Avi Nash, who wants to start a graphics and animation studio, to first work at a small firm of around ten employees in the same industry. This teaches you the business on someone else's dime, builds your network, and lets you see if the founder's lifestyle matches what you want before you risk your own money.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question from one of our newsletter readers, Avi Nash, who wrote in saying, "Hi Evan, I love your emails and I read them carefully. I'm a student of an MBA program and I also want to be an entrepreneur. I want to start a one-stop shop graphics and animation studio as my life ambition." but it will take me a long time to get some experience in the field. So I want your suggestions for young entrepreneurs. Thank you, Avinash. So thanks for the question. Great question. I think the very first step for any entrepreneur who wants to get started is to figure out what type of business that they want to run, and you always want to build it around something you're really passionate about. And so it sounds like you, you've probably found that. So if you have, that's great. Whether it is, you know, creating this animation studio or doing something completely different, you want to make sure you're building a business around something that you're really passionate about helping people with. The next step that I usually recommend is go out and work for somebody else who's already done it. And so this could be where your next step is if you're, you know, graduating your program and, you know, you're not ready to start up your own business quite yet, but you want to learn a little bit more about it. Go work for somebody who's already done what you're trying to do. It's one of the fastest ways to learn. So go find somebody who has a small business. So somebody who's, say, 10 employees, who's in exactly the same field that you want to do, and go learn from them. And get involved, try to do more than whatever your job description is. Entrepreneurs always need help, and if you can be a keener and show that you're really interested and eager and want to learn from them, then they'll give you extra tasks. Even if it's not paid for those extra tasks, or you're working extra hours, you're doing it because you want to learn, right? If you're going to take a job, you want it to teach you something and not just do it for the money. And I look at it this way, you're being paid to learn about your industry. So instead of going out and trying it yourself and probably failing because you don't know what you're doing yet, you go work for somebody else who's already done it, you're learning from their mistakes, and if you're making mistakes, it's on somebody else's dime. So they're paying you to make mistakes, and they're paying you to learn about the industry. And so it'll do two things. One, it'll teach you about the industry, it'll give you contacts, it'll tell you, you You know, what you're doing, if it's right, if it's wrong, you know, the insider tricks, what kind of team you need to have, how to go out and get customers, all those things. And so the more you can get involved in the whole business and approach the entrepreneur and say you want more responsibility, you want to get more involved, the more you can learn from them about the business, then the more success, you know, you'll probably have because you've learned on somebody else's dime. But also it'll tell you if you really want to do this business or not. Often entrepreneurs get started in a business and they realize, "Oh, this is too much work," or "This isn't what I thought it was going to be," and they lose a lot of money and time and have to shut down, and they're frustrated and in debt. By going to work for somebody else who's already doing what you want to do, it'll give you the understanding of what that business is like. You can look at that entrepreneur's life. Do you like how they live their life? Do you like their lifestyle and the hours they're working and the type of things that they're producing? Is that the life that you want? And it may be, yeah, that's an awesome life, I want that. Or no, that's crazy, I didn't, I didn't think it would be this much work, or it wasn't what I thought it was. And so again, you're learning while getting paid, and it'll tell you if that's the right business to do or not. And so that's usually my recommendation for getting started. First, find something you're really passionate about that you feel you can help other people, add a lot of value to their lives. And then try to go find somebody who's already done what you're trying to do, a smallish company, 10 employees or so, where you can really learn the industry, get some experience, get some contacts, and see if it's something that you want to do or not before you go out and launch your own business. And when you do, you'll have a lot of the experience that you'll need by working— because you've worked for that other company. So hopefully that helps as your next step, Avinash. Good luck with finishing your program and launching your own business. For those of you watching, if you liked it, please give it a thumbs up below. Makes me want to do more of these videos for you. And if you have a question about your business, feel free to leave it in the comments below. I always read those and I try to respond to all of them if I can. So thank you, and I'll see you in the next episode.
