Master the Power of Simplicity in Business – Keep it Simple

We appreciate that there is some irony in saying “keep it simple” at the end of a long series telling you all the steps that you need to take (just from the legal perspective) to start your business.

However, it is important to keep it simple.

Once you’ve taken the basic steps to set up your business, and after you’ve sufficiently protected yourself from a legal standpoint,  it’s important to focus on your actual business.

“Once you’ve taken the basic steps to set up your business, and after you’ve sufficiently protected yourself from a legal standpoint,  it’s important to focus on your actual business.” 

Consulting with an attorney can be a great way to help you figure out whether you are properly managing your potential risks so that you can focus on the actual substance of your business. This checklist should also help you identify areas that you may have overlooked.

But don’t underestimate the value of simplicity in starting a business.

In the book The Lean Startup, author Eric Ries makes a great analogy about simplicity in business. He says that when you take your daily commute to work, you really a thousand little decisions. You decide where to turn, when to slow down at a stoplight, whether to speed or take your time. But you make those decisions as you go. You don’t plan out every single decision in advance.

That’s one end of the spectrum.

The other end of the spectrum is launching a rocket ship. Rocket scientists have to plan every single contingency and every single step in the launch of a rocketship.

It’s the equivalent of trying to make every decision for morning commute before you even get in the car. The difficult part here is that there are so many variables and you don’t know what will happen once you’re behind the wheel.

Rocket scientists have to account for every single variable beforehand and determine ways to navigate every single obstacle before the rocket takes off.

Eric Ries says that starting a business is, and should be, more like your daily commute. Too many business owners treat starting a business like launching a rocket ship. But the fact is, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You will need to navigate obstacles as they come up, and that’s okay.

Make the minimum number of decisions that you can now, think through your end goal and the potential contingencies in all of that. But don’t let planning get in the way of actually starting.