How to start an online company: PiC and Advisor

Welcome to the fourth post with my humble advice on starting an online company; see post one, two and three.

After I had put together my one page business concept outline, I set about formalizing the idea so that I had something tangible and persuasive to pitch to investors. I also realized that if I wanted to do this, I would need help, so I set about recruiting a PiC, and some advisory support.

Partner in Crime

If you’ve decided to start a company, you’re going to be living and breathing it. You’re going to be thinking and talking about it incessantly, and your friends and family are going to tire quickly. When they do, you’re going to need someone else to talk to, and ideally, someone who’s going to talk back. You need to find someone who’s as compulsively devoted to the idea and building the business as you are, someone who can tolerate your craziness by matching it tit for tat. This will be your PiC. He or she will be the person you bounce ideas off 24 hours a day, the person who always answers your calls, and the person who contributes the complimentary insight, skills and experience needed to round off your business concept. Your PiC is the foundation of your future team, and unless you had one to begin to with, you’ll need to start looking.

My PiC is my longtime friend, Benjamin Pochhammer. We go way back to kindergarten, and I grew up with him and his brothers as some of my closest friends. When I was getting started with CareerMee.com, Benny was also looking for a new project, and he quickly became as involved and crazy as I was. He had the complimentary skill set and international experience that the project needed and he takes half the credit for getting the company going and keeping it running. He now sits in the office next to mine and handles employer relations (among many other things).

If you’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur, then you’ve probably been talking about it since you were young – the person who you always had time to listen to your ideas is your ideal PiC…at least it was in my case.

Advisor

The next person you’ll need is a Yoda (that explains the picture!) – someone older, wiser, and more realistic than you. There will be a constant stream of questions forming in your head as you start putting together your pitch, your business plan, and begin development, and the best person to answer these questions is someone who’s done it before. Your advisor could be anyone with business experience – a relative, a neighbor, an old boss, or a complete stranger. If you don’t know anyone personally who you think could help, then try family friends and contacts. If you can’t find anyone who you have any personal connection to, don’t fret, you’ll just have to find a stranger – join entrepreneur clubs, talk to local business people, scour online startup communities. Finding an advisor may be easy for some and difficult for others, but it has the added advantage of giving you invaluable pitching practice, a skill that can’t be taught.

On top of advising, your advisor performs the important function of adding credibility to your project and would, ideally, be able to open a few doors and share a few contacts that will help you get started. My advisor was my marketing professor at ESADE, Prof Oreol Iglesias. I remember approaching him with my idea, and his first response was something to the effect of “shut up, keep it to yourself and get to work quickly”. Good advice.

In the next post I’ll talk about the broad business models you could adopt.

Pic courtesy of Flickr user PhillipWest