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Making the leap to starting a business - Q & A

Rich, Jeff and Guy take a call from Will, who wants to know how to take the leap from a corporate sales job to “starting it up” on his own.

Rich Sloan:  Yep.  We've got -- let's see -- we've got Will out of Fort Lauderdale calling 866-55-START.  Will, you have a question or a comment for Guy Kawasaki?

Will:    Well, actually I've got a big question.  I'm --

Rich Sloan:  You're starting a revolution.

Will:  Yeah, basically.  Here's the deal.  I'm on the road to a middle-income America.  I work for a Fortune 500 company.  I’m in sales.  On the other hand, I've got a family -- we've owned a chain of dry cleaners for 50 years.  We were very successful in the dry cleaning delivery service back in the '80s.  The three drivers we had back then, two retired rich, young; and one passed away, and my father never replaced him.  I was a little bit too young.  I didn't understand the dynamics.  I didn't understand the potential.

Rich Sloan:   All right.  And your question is?

Will:  My question is this: How do I make the leap, because I'm looking at my potential now --

Rich Sloan:  As we understand this, Will, you wanna make the leap from your Fortune 500 job to working on the dry cleaning business?

Will:  Correct.  I want to start up a dry cleaning delivery service, residential and commercial.

Rich Sloan:  See that, Guy, we got him to do the pitch finally at the end.

Guy Kawasaki:  Yeah, right.

Jeff Sloan: So what do you think, Guy?  You know, this is an interesting opportunity to talk about other areas of business opportunity out there.  First of all, how do you feel about the dry cleaning delivery business today?

Guy Kawasaki:   Well, I can't tell you that I know anything about it. 

Jeff Sloan: No, no, but your intuition.  I mean you know what's going on out there.  What does America want?  What are consumers buying and not buying today?  Is that an area of opportunity, do you think?

Guy Kawasaki:  Uh, boy.

Jeff Sloan:  Well, let's do this.  How about trends?  That certainly takes advantage of the fact that people have less time on their hands today, the convenience of getting your dry cleaning delivered to the door.  I don't know, sounds good to me.

Guy Kawasaki:  I mean that would be the positive way.  A skeptic might say, "Look at the trend towards casual clothes.  Everybody's wearing jeans.  You don't send jeans to the dry cleaners."  So as a typical kind of business, if you believe in the business, you view it through positive perspective.  If you don't, you come up with something negative to say, and most times venture capitalists are coming up with negative things.

To get to his question, I think, to a large degree this is purely a mental issue.  I don't think it's mechanistic in the sense that you have to do A and B and C and D and E.  You have to just take the leap or not.  That's easy for me to say, but if you have this comfortable Fortune 500 job and you're thinking of becoming an entrepreneur and you have kids and they have education costs and clothing and, you know, et cetera, et cetera, that's what stops many people from trying to be an entrepreneur.

Now, if it were guaranteed or even highly likely that you'd succeed, more people would be jumping.  But that would be inaccurate for me to say.  However, if you do jump and you are successful, you know, you might make much more money then working for the Fortune 500 company.  So I can't exactly come to an answer.  I can just lay out the parameters.

Rich Sloan:  You know, Guy, I think that that thing that you're saying about it being largely a mental thing, it's like that famous quote from Goethe, "There's magic power in genius and commitment."  And it's really amazing.  We've found with the thousands of entrepreneurs that we've come across, as soon as they set themselves on a course, an absolute course to succeed in business, all sorts of possibilities start opening up.  All sorts of opportunities bubble up to the surface.

Jeff Sloan:  I think that's true.  I also think that fear of failing thing, especially when you've got the kids and so on, man.  That's a way to keep you focused.  No doubt about it. 

Guy, we talked about trends.  You know, we were kidding around about whether dry cleaning is a good opportunity today or not.  What about, are there things, you know, We get so many calls saying, "I want to start a business.  I don't know what to do."  In about a minute, do you have any thoughts on areas that people should look at?

Guy Kawasaki:  Well, I don't think that the question is phrased correctly, if they pose it that way.  It's not like you get up in the morning and you say, "I want to be an entrepreneur.  Should I make chips, software, dry cleaners, desks?  You know, what should I do?"  I think that's the wrong order.

Jeff Sloan:  What's the right way?

Guy Kawasaki:  Well, the right way is you love dry cleaning or you love software or you love chips or you love, you know, wireless.  And because of your love of something and your knowledge of that industry, you're gonna go change that industry.  So that's the way it should work and, if it happens to be art, then, you know, become an artist.  But don't do it because you read in Business Week that, you know, the market for art is getting bigger. 

Rich Sloan:  All right.

Guy Kawasaki:  Quite frankly, you might not have the talent.

Rich Sloan:  So passion plays a major role in that analysis.  Guy, when we come back from this break, we've got someone who wants to do an elevator pitch.  Get ready for an elevator ride and stay tuned in.