If your dream is to open a hair salon, now might be one of the best times to do it. According to Zion Market Research, the salon industry is growing steadily and is projected to continue growing. They estimate that the global spa and beauty salon market should reach approximately 190.81 billion USD in 2024. In the U.S. alone, the salon industry is estimated to be worth $47.1 billion, and the market size is expected to increase by 1.5 percent in 2019.

If you are planning to start a hair salon, this guide will give you the details you need to get started. Plus, we’ve asked two salon owners to offer some tips to get your shop up and running.

Dallas Alleman, the owner of Salon Du Beau Monde in New Orleans, and Avi Shenkar, the owner of Philadelphia-based BLO/OUT, have different backgrounds and different business models, but share similar strategies for success.

Alleman has a 40-year history in the salon business, as both a licensed cosmetologist and an instructor. He has opened three salons in New York, Santa Fe, and New Orleans, and his current endeavor is a high-end boutique salon that offers all the traditional services.

Shenkar, on the other hand, is an entrepreneur with business experience, but no salon background. However, he has opened two BLO/OUT locations in Philadelphia and is working on three other locations. 

While they may run different types of salons, many of their tips for success are the same. 

It’s important to have a plan in place before you open your salon. Here are a few things you’ll want to do before you open:

Create a business plan

No business can function properly without a business plan. A business plan acts like a roadmap, a document that will guide your business to success. 

But, business planning doesn’t have to be a long drawn out process. In fact, you’ve probably already put together a lot of the information mentally, or even scribbled a few notes on paper. The point of a solid business plan is to figure out what your business is, how it will be successful, and how you’ll troubleshoot problems.

Our article on How to Write a Business Plan is a good starting point if you need a formal business plan, and if you’re looking for a faster, lightweight planning option, check out our guide to Lean Planning. You can also download our free business plan template, and take a look at our salon industry sample business plans to see how other salons have approached the process. If you’d rather not start from scratch, you can also try LivePlan, our business planning software.

Figure out funding

Whether you’re seeking a traditional bank loan or borrowing money from friends and family, you need to figure out how much money you need to get started, and where it will be coming from. 

Most likely, you’ll be doing a combination of multiple funding methods, and you may be using your own money and bootstrapping your business. Regardless of what route you take, it’s important to have a clear idea at the outset of where the money is coming from. Our funding guide gives an overview of your options if you aren’t yet sure what funding options are right for your salon.

Find a mentor

As you’re planning your business, it’s a great time to find a business mentor. It’s best to find someone in the salon industry that can answer questions for you as you start and grow your business.

Put an accounting and inventory program in place

To keep track of your money and project growth, you’ll want to implement an accounting and inventory program. 

On the accounting side, you’ll need a program to track your revenue and expenses. You’ll also need to figure out how you’ll pay Uncle Sam, so it’s a good idea to sit down and chat with an accountant to help you get started.

You’ll also need a way to track inventory; Salon Today has some great tips on this particular topic.

Hunt for the right location

Choosing the right location is the difference between success and failure, Shenkar says. He admits that if he could go back and pick a location for his first salon, he probably wouldn’t pick the same spot. 

You want to select a spot with good traffic, high visibility, and is located where your target demographic shops or lives. Shenkar advises being fussy about your location, as it’s vital to the success of your salon.

Aside from touring around various locations with a realtor, Alleman suggests driving through the areas that you want to be located in and look for vacant properties. Just because there isn’t a “for sale” sign in the window doesn’t mean it’s not available. In his experience, people sometimes hang on to a property for sentimental reasons and are willing to rent it out if the right opportunity comes along. It never hurts to call and ask the owner if an arrangement can be made.

You don’t just want the right storefront—you want the whole package, says Shenkar. So, do your homework. Know the demographics, the local competitors, and think about how your customers will get to your salon. Is there ample parking? Is a construction project planned on your block? You want to know everything you can about the area before you select a location.

With the planning stages complete, you’ll move on to the nitty-gritty details of actually opening your salon.

Build your salon brand around the clientele you want

Before you start painting the walls and picking out furniture, make sure that your brand vision matches the kind of clientele you want to attract. According to Alleman, this is one of the most important lessons he has learned.

“You want your customers to feel comfortable in your salon, so make it a place they want to visit,” he says.

This means taking what you know about your target market, and working to create a brand for your salon based on their interests, tastes, and habits. Don’t overlook the importance of building a brand for your salon; the idea of “branding” might feel like something only big businesses do, but it’s necessary to tailor your look to your intended client base, and creating a brand is a key part of that process.

Provide excellent customer service

After you’ve created an environment that your clients will love, you have to follow through by offering excellent customer service.

“Provide an experience for your customers, not just a service,” Shenkar says. “The overall experience is what keeps customers coming back.”

Consider thinking through your customer service strategy early on, including hiring for emotional intelligence, rather than just skill set. And, you may want to look into tools to help you deliver better customer service, like a shared inbox tool to manage inquiries and booking requests. 

Set aside money for marketing

To be successful, you need clients. To attract clients, you need a solid marketing plan. Alleman suggests setting aside some money to market your business; without it, you’ll struggle to be able to really execute a marketing strategy. 

Create an attractive, well-thought-out website

For starters, you need a good website. Alleman suggests hiring a professional to create your site if you can afford it. That said, if you’re tight on cash, there are plenty of DIY website platforms out there. Your site should be attractive, easy to navigate, and ideally include helpful information for your customers, such as hours, location, contact info, and pricing. As most salons use an online booking system nowadays, that’s also an important element to look into (or you may lose customers to salons who do offer this convenience). 

When designing your website, it’s important to return to your brand vision and what you’ve learned about your target market. Your site is an extension of your brand, so it should be cohesive and match the image you want your salon to present to customers. 

If you’re building your website yourself, check out our guide to building a website.

Find creative, low-cost marketing ideas

You want to get the word out about your salon, and getting involved in your community is a great way to do that. Consider hosting an event like a ribbon cutting or a small charity event to attract more customers—for example, sponsor a school play or have the staff volunteer at a local baseball game. 

For more marketing strategies that can be relatively low-cost and will help you build your presence within your local community, check out our article on how to attract customers for your opening day. 

Set up and utilize social media accounts

Social media is an important component to your marketing plan, Shenkar says. 

If you wish to set up accounts on a variety of platforms, it’s not a bad idea to do so. However, make sure you can confidently say whether or not your target market uses the platforms, and that you have the bandwidth to post content on multiple platforms before you commit. 

At a minimum, it’s a good idea to build your presence on Instagram, as it lends itself well to a visual business. Start by getting a sense of what hashtags are popular within your niche and creating a content strategy, as well as following other local businesses and encouraging your customers to tag your salon when they visit. 

Don’t assume product lines will generate huge revenue

As an owner, you’ll need to select a product line. There are lots of options to choose from; while some shop owners sell a variety of product lines, Alleman advises against it.

“I find that choosing one brand to work with is less confusing for the client and the staff,” he says.

Some shops sell a lot of product, but Alleman says you shouldn’t look at it as a big revenue source. You’ll spend money up front to buy inventory, and even though you’ll sell it at a price to make a profit, that money usually goes right back into purchasing more product. So, it’s smart to consider starting small, and perhaps focusing on one product line in the beginning.

Once you’ve thought through all the details of how to open your salon to the public, you’ll turn your attention to how to grow your business. Here are some areas you’ll want to keep in mind. 

Hire staff based on personality

When you’re first starting out, you might be the only employee. But hopefully, your shop will be so popular that you’ll need to hire additional help, as well as bring on more stylists. When that happens, Alleman suggests hiring someone based more on personality than skill.

“I don’t hire for talent—I can teach a new hire the skills I want, but I can’t train someone to love and nurture my clients,” he says.

You want your clients to enjoy coming in. Of course, you want someone who is good at what they do, but you shouldn’t base your decision on skills alone. Personality matters.

Plan for finding new customers and retaining them

When a customer finds a stylist he or she likes, they usually become repeat clients. However, this doesn’t mean you should let up on your marketing efforts. Even if you have a steady stream of customers, you should build on the marketing efforts that you’re already using.

“I don’t believe in depending on any kind of business,” Shenkar says. “New client acquisition should be a full-time job and should never be overlooked. Contentment will kill a salon.”

Revisit your business plan regularly

A business plan should always be viewed as a work in progress. With each passing month, you learn more about your business and your customer base. 

It’s a good idea to go back to your plan, read it over, and make sure you’re still on track. A monthly plan review meeting can be helpful, as can running a SWOT analysis on your business. 

Look for ways to save on overhead

When you first open your doors, you may have splurged on a few things that you thought you needed, but really don’t. With your business established, review your inventory and see if you can make any changes or cuts to save money. Take a look at your monthly expenses too—is there anything you can trim back or get rid of? Maybe you can downgrade your internet service, or cut back on the amount of product you’re buying each month.

Opening a salon is a bold endeavor. As with any new venture, it’s important to plan as much as you can and be willing to adapt as you learn what works best for your business. You’ll spend a lot of time and money to get your salon off the ground, but Alleman says there is nothing like running a sought-after, successful salon.

I’ve been an entrepreneur for the last five years, during which we’ve bootstrapped our innovation management software company Viima to a good number of happy customers, including some from the Global Fortune 500, and achieved a solid growth rate. I’ve also followed the entrepreneurial journeys of a number of friends and acquaintances up close during these last few years.

While we’ve all had our fair share of challenges along the way, the most common, the most difficult, and the most frustrating ones always seem to be related to the way you and others on your team think.

Why your mindset matters more than you think

As long as you have a solid team in place, most practical challenges are often actually surprisingly straightforward to solve.

Do you need to acquire more leads? Build a new and improved version of your product? Perhaps sell more or optimize your cash flow?

All of these take work, and perhaps a bit of ingenuity here and there. However, there’s tons of information and guidance out there to help you achieve your goals.

On the other hand, there are some mental factors that can impact your success as an entrepreneur—but that’s much less talked about.

Starting from scratch and being responsible for everything is an incredibly humbling experience. It can feel overwhelming at times and there’s guaranteed to be plenty of times when you feel like giving up. And without the right mindset, you surely will.

What’s more, once your team grows, people will be looking to you, as the founder, for example on how to behave. Whether you want it or not, the mindset you have and the way you behave will largely determine the culture of your company, both for the better and for the worse.

As such, if you know yourself and are capable of managing your mindset and the behavior that results from it, you have the keys to mastering your own destiny.

7 lessons for mastering your mindset game

I was fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to study the topic during my master’s degree studies, as well as talk to a number of successful entrepreneurs at the beginning of my journey. Even so, as a first-time entrepreneur, I’ve had to learn many of the following lessons the hard way.

I’ll now share my thoughts and experiences so that you’ll hopefully be able to avoid many of the mistakes I, and many others before me, have made.

1. You can’t survive without a growth mindset

Our entire founding team was made up of first-time entrepreneurs. We knew we had no chance but to learn all the skills it would take to create and run a successful software business.

While we certainly did know a thing or two about software and business, it was still quite evident that there was way more we didn’t know. What’s more, we didn’t really have the resources to hire outside help to do things for us.

Since we knew what we needed to accomplish, we just had to figure out ways to accomplish those things by ourselves. This, fortunately, forced us to adopt a growth mindset and we gradually taught ourselves the skills we needed, such as marketing, design, and finance. The list just goes on.

If we’d simply stayed in our comfort zone and would’ve thought that “I’m just not that good at X, it’s best to leave it for those who are more gifted,” we likely would’ve never made it past our first year in business.

As our team has grown, we’ve also introduced a systematic framework that every employee follows to help them constantly get better at their work.

2. Ego is always your biggest enemy

Quite recently I read “Ego Is the Enemy” by Ryan Holiday. It’s a brilliantly written book that put into words many of the most common challenges people seem to have in business, and life in general.

We suffer from a huge number of cognitive biases, that affect the way we think unless we question our initial thoughts. For example, one study after another has confirmed the bias for illusory superiority by confirming that people tend to rate themselves as above average 90 percent of the time, which clearly can’t be true. An untamed ego hampers our ability to learn and develop, as well as clouds and impairs our judgment.

If you take the time to reflect and truly know yourself and battle vanity, you can avoid doing all the wrong things for the wrong reasons, which in turn allows you to focus on the big picture. While most certainly important for everyone, this is especially crucial for leaders and entrepreneurs.

3. Be brutally honest and realistic—both with yourself and your team

As an entrepreneur, you’re most likely spending a lot of time trying to convince others to believe in your vision, be they prospects, investors, or team members. It’s just a natural part of the job.

However, by repeating the same stories enough times, you can easily end up convincing yourself too, even if the vision you’re communicating wouldn’t be anywhere near a reality. And that’s a problem.

While you most certainly have to believe in your ability to achieve that vision and deliver on those promises, you and the rest of the team also have to be realistic about, and critical of, the progress you make in order to have a decent shot at actually achieving those goals.

I’ve too often seen founders and other leaders start living too much in a world filled with visions and strategies while detaching themselves from the real world. If this happens, the company is virtually guaranteed to fail to achieve those visions and strategic goals. Startups are, after all, primarily an execution game.

4. Have a company-first mindset and be transparent about it

It’s generally accepted that the purpose of a company is to generate profit.

As a founder, there will most certainly be times when your, or someone else’s, best interests and those of the company will be opposed to each other. Usually, these are quite minor, often times even insignificant occasions.

In these situations, it can at times be tempting to rationalize to yourself that by putting your own interests first, the company will also benefit, when in reality this is never optimal for the company. These situations often form a slippery slope where the effects can eventually start to cumulate.

However, the real problem isn’t even financial, it’s about the culture. This kind of behavior is likely to spread and once that happens, you’re no longer a team where each member is willing to make sacrifices for the greater good, but are more like a ragtag group of bandits out in it for themselves.

So, in these situations, you always need to make the rational long-term decision of putting the company first. In practice, this means that for every decision you make, you should be able to, clearly, rationally and without ambiguity, establish how that decision will help the company’s business in the long run.

If you do this, you shouldn’t have any qualms about being transparent with the employees about the decisions being made. Transparency enables everyone to be on the same page and empowers employees to make the same kind of company-first decisions themselves, setting you up for long-term success.

5. People look to you for example—and usually focus on the parts you wouldn’t like them to focus on

As a leader, but especially as the founder of a company, people look up to you for example, whether you like it or not. Leading by example is very much a cliché, but it really does matter.

If you’re emphasizing the importance of working hard but are always the first one to leave the office to play tennis, why would your employees stay any longer?

If you’re rooting your team to come up with new ideas and innovate, but keep shooting down all the ideas they come up with, how long do you think they’re going to continue that?

If you’re always telling people how important quality is but are cutting corners and being sloppy yourself, where do you think your employees will then draw the line of “good enough”?

You can certainly argue that after years of hard work that got the company to where it is, you would have earned the right to take certain freedoms for yourself.

However, as the company and team grows, your example becomes even more important.

If you’re no longer willing to put in the hours or live up to your own standards, it sends a strong message for your team and will without a doubt affect the way they behave, undermining much of what you’ve spent years building.

6. Owners need to have a shared set of values and expectations

When you’re first setting up the company, probably the single biggest mistake you can make is to choose the wrong co-founders.

I’ve been fortunate to be a part of a great founding team where our values and expectations for the future have been very much in sync since the beginning, which has made things easy for us, even during some of the tough times we’ve had.

However, I’ve seen companies where this most certainly hasn’t been the case.

If one founder is simply passionate about the idea that they’re working on, one is looking to learn as much as possible, and the third is just looking for a nice exit in the very near future, the team is almost guaranteed to break apart as soon as they hit a speed bump that forces them to make significant changes to their initial shared vision.

This is why values and expectations matter; they change infrequently, but still underlie virtually every major decision you make. As long as your values and expectations are aligned, it’s easy to simply change direction and pick the option that makes the most sense at the time.

There is a plethora of different motivations for becoming an entrepreneur, but you’re much more likely to persist and stay in the game long enough to succeed if you’re motivated by things other than simply money, such as learning or making an impact with your business.

7. It’s important to find ways to be optimistic and positive

If you’re a would-be entrepreneur but haven’t taken the leap yet, you might be slightly intimidated by some of these lessons, and you should. Being an entrepreneur most certainly isn’t easy, and more than 90 percent will fail.

However, at the same time, it can be incredibly rewarding. Building something from nothing that can make the world a better place, offer people meaningful jobs, and learning to do whatever it takes to get there is an experience that I most certainly wouldn’t change for anything.

These aspects, along with the great culture and atmosphere we have with our team, have kept us going even when things haven’t always gone according to our plans.

So, while you must be very critical of yourself and realistic in your planning, you should also find ways to be optimistic about your future and have a positive outlook on life. This will help you get through the tough times on your entrepreneurial journey.

Additional resources

Even though I’ve learned the importance of these lessons and am certainly trying my best to follow them, it doesn’t mean that I’d always be able to do so.

Self-reflection is an essential part of the process of getting better and I’ve found reading to be a tremendously helpful tool for that.

A regular reading habit helps widen my perspective, allows me to keep learning, and provides me with a great way to reflect on the journey.

Here are a few books that I recommend you read if you’d like to learn more about some of the themes we’ve discussed in this article:

• Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
• Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
• Chasing Excellence by Ben Bergeron
• Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday

I’ve learned a lot in my twelve years in business. Practically 90 percent of that time was spent starting and closing one startup or another. I had to fail for 10 straight years to be prepared to scale a 

Entrepreneurship looked bleak to me and failure unavoidable. But I didn’t pull the plug on myself. I learned resiliency in business through multiple failures, and I matured quickly. Each failure offered lessons I wouldn’t have been able to learn in any school.

Here’s what I learned along the way.

1. Start documenting—don’t create.

Creating instead of documenting has killed a lot of businesses that had awesome ideas. I got this term from Gary Vee. He says the “create” approach means working on your project until you’re certain it’s completely polished and looks like the top products in the market, and your strategies and sales tools are all top-notch before you ever think of launching.

This requires solid funding to pull off, it’s a huge risk, and will take a lot of time for most rookie entrepreneurs. The danger here is that perfectionism can derail the entire project before it ever gets off the ground.

I recommend that businesses ”document” instead of focusing on creating. In this instance, to document means simply to make a product that sincerely solves a dire need, and launch it after few iterations so that it reaches the target audience as fast as possible.

This strategy means shipping quickly and making improvements as you grow. You can actually ship an MVP (minimum viable product), perfect it, and settle other issues as they come up. This actually aligns closely with the Lean Planning approach, which allows your business to be more agile and make adjustments as you test your idea in the market.

Two of my startups failed because I was so busy “creating” or perfecting the products. Business perfectionism killed my execution and that slowed my business down. One example of the risk of this sort of perfectionism is when I had an issue with the way the product looked, the delays killed the idea.

Focus the majority of your time on the 80 percent of business components that bring in the most money. I had been ignorantly focusing on the 20 percent of the business that wasn’t directly related to revenue. I thought that focus was critical, but in hindsight, I was effectively just doing things that would kill my business.

I had two core realizations from this experience:

First, I was letting my temperaments rule my business. As a part sanguine and part melancholic, I was addicted to perfecting things before I launched. I had to grow myself out this phase and force myself to let go.

Second, I soon found out that clients didn’t care about the packaging the way I had thought they did. Customers simply wanted a working product that solved their problem.

Potential customers want value, and they will go any length to get it. I’ve discovered that many times, nothing is really wrong with our product. The core stumbling block is the lack of execution or not executing fast enough to the right audience. Second-guessing breeds fear, and fear incapacitates you.

My freelance business looked ugly. I didn’t have the best of website themes and my design skills were terrible—I thought these issues would repel clients. I was wrong. I simply needed to ignore the perfection impulse and focus on the business engines that were really important.

When I say business engines, I mean components that keep a machine working. Think of your business as a machine made of diverse components that help it function effectively.

So instead of focusing on the designs and themes (the aesthetic), I should have focused on the sales engines (ways to improve my sales funnels). I should have spent more time on the feedback engines—or tracking what was working and what wasn’t for actual customers. And optimizing my outbound marketing email strategy also would have served my business better.

2. Each failure or setback is important.

Now, I’m not suggesting that failing is good. I’m simply saying that each setback has a way of teaching you why some strategy won’t work and why others might. Setbacks have a way of showing you what your lapses are, and what you can do about them.

Than main reasons that four of my startups failed were due to wrong market analysis. At first, I wasn’t your typical research-your-market-very-well kind of guy.

I was naïve like every rookie entrepreneur and kept entering competitive niches that were too tight to make money. I knew how to craft products to look good. I had lots of ideas flowing through my mind about potential niches, but l wasn’t getting much traction because the competition was too fierce. That was a failure poking right back at me. Failures and setbacks made me feel bad. Those bad feelings forced me to sit up.

So, I started cultivating a strategy to systematically check for mistakes and quickly work out solutions, because when it took too long to implement changes or address miscalculations, I ran the risk of it ballooning into a larger failure or issue.

For me, the key to reducing setbacks in my freelance business was to study my business metrics, do a robust market analysis, and close the loopholes as they emerged. The faster I did that, the more high paying clients I secured.

For rookie entrepreneurs, focus on learning how to mend business cracks as quickly as you find them, and you’ll minimize the impact of unexpected challenges.

But for this to work, you need to develop the habit of tracking all your numbers. Know every business metric for your company—start with Google Analytics. This will help you discover issues before they become bigger and more problematic.

3. It’s essential to have a strategy for getting customers.

This is the most important reason we’re in business—to get customers who will pay for our services. What helped me to succeed in my freelance business was my strategic approach to customer acquisition.

Business must be calculable—and it’s same with customer acquisition.

I started to focus on one central question: How can I position myself to get more customers for my business? The more I asked that question, the more I was forced to do deep research to get answers. Those answers prompted me to take action and set up better funnels.

To succeed, a business must have funnels. How did I build mine?

I simply focused on two core aspects of my business: the client acquisition funnel and the repeat customer acquisition funnel.

The first funnel that I set up was for client acquisition. Clients are humans so that ultimately makes them emotional beings that make buying decisions based on their emotions.  

You can easily set this up by simply figuring out where your clients are and how to grab them. My clients are very much active on LinkedIn, so I automated the process of reaching out to potential leads by delegating people on my team to do it systematically, so I didn’t have to personally focus so much on this aspect of my business.

I set up the second outreach funnel to make sure I retained my clients, so I wouldn’t just lose them after one or two jobs.

The first funnel kept clients coming in, the second focused on established clients and kept them ordering.

4. Entrepreneurship is a waiting game.

You need to hold on when things aren’t working out the way you want them to.

I started seeing real income from a business after closing seven startups in eight years. Tenacity is the key to success in the entrepreneurial journey.

To tell the truth, when I started, I wasn’t in the best financial position to run a business. Coupled with the recession in my country, it took a lot of emotional fights and doing odd jobs to keep myself standing. And I had to learn different skills to make money in the long period before I was making money from my main business.

I knew that if I could hold on and keep doing what I was doing, success was inevitable. So hold on. Don’t get depressed if stuff doesn’t work out the way you envisioned at first.

Just don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Keep learning new skills that can benefit your startup, and try to leverage them to get side jobs too.

For me, giving up wasn’t an option. That resolve kept me strong till I finally had everything in place to grow a viable, successful business. If you’re not seeing anything yet, hold on, with resiliency you will hit gold. In the meantime, make sure you have a good handle on your personal strengths and weaknesses, and do everything you can to address them.

Get a mentor. I regret not getting one in my early days. There were many mistakes I could have avoided if I had someone with more experience and perspective to talk through my ideas with. Just don’t give up.

I started my first business at eight years old, buying and selling Beanie Babies, to afford an electric guitar. I liked the feeling of buying something for a low price, then selling it at a markup at the right time. Little did I know, I’d just discovered my passion for growing young companies.

Years later, I had moved beyond plush toys and into digital marketing. My online music company, Fame Wizard, eventually evolved into a business education platform for musicians. I replaced myself with a new CEO at Fame Wizard to start a T-shirt company called Swag of the Month. Looking back, I wasn’t destined to sell toys or T-shirts; I just loved how it felt to start with nothing and grow a successful business.

So, I started advertising my expertise as a marketer. I quickly realized that there are thousands of digital agencies and experts, but saw that the vast majority of them knew almost nothing about digital marketing within the industries they served. And the good ones required long contracts and lots of cash.

Despite the oversaturated market, I saw my opportunity to get it right where no one else did: I created Hawke Media, hired a few people, then went to companies and showed them our no-contract, a la carte options. I used my experience to give my pitch credibility. Before long, I was succeeding in a market everyone considered to be tapped dry.

The importance of passion

You can start a business about anything. But if you’re not passionate about it, you won’t see it through, and the business won’t grow.

In college, for example, I started a business called Stormwater Maintenance Company with a friend. We built and installed filters for storm drains. New California laws had created a need for such devices, and we got in early enough to experience quick growth.

Despite setting up the company, building the sales and marketing plans, and even completing the legal work when we couldn’t afford a lawyer, I left the company to finish my degree. I believed in the business plan and the opportunity, but I didn’t care about storm drains enough to see it through.

No matter how much I enjoyed facilitating growth, I knew that when the going got tough, my heart wouldn’t be in running the company.

Avoiding failure is avoiding the true meaning of life

Just ask Arianna Huffington; despite her incredible success, she failed many times as an entrepreneur, especially early on.

A total of 36 different publishers rejected her second book, for instance. And while HuffPost eventually took off, Huffington saw many very negative reviews of her site when it launched, but they didn’t deter her. Experiences like these not only helped her learn to not fear failure, but also proved that what her mother used to tell her was true: “Failure is not the opposite of success; it’s a stepping stone to success.”

Trying to avoid mistakes and failures is the quickest path to stagnation because you won’t take risks that can lead to growth. Identifying that truth before I became too invested was the tipping point in my entrepreneurial career. By taking risks and discovering your passions, you can build the skills you need to grow a company while staying open to the opportunities worth pursuing.

How to grow a company in any industry

Don’t let naysayers decide what kind of business you should run. Follow these four steps to start a successful company in any area.

1. Fill a need

The surest way to find a successful niche is to fulfill a need that no one else does.

When I started in digital marketing, I didn’t do it because I stubbornly wanted to work in that field. Instead, I observed that existing players didn’t fulfill the needs that I personally had while running other companies, so I decided to fill them myself. When I started offering better service options, clients started appearing out of the woodwork.

Identifying your differentiator is the most difficult task when starting any business. For us, that meant providing great services, which eliminated most of the market, then offering month-to-month options, which eliminated the rest. By building our brand on that differentiator, we have been able to establish a reputation based on how well we fulfill legitimate business needs.

2. Have an insatiable appetite

Successful entrepreneurs feel an insatiable need to grow their companies. If you get comfortable, you’ll stop growing, and other companies will overtake you before you realize it.

Set measurable goals along your path to bigger achievements. When you realize that your larger goal is within reach, don’t pop the champagne and sit back—acknowledge your accomplishment and establish a new goal before you surpass the old one. If your goal was to grow your revenue to $1 million, set a new goal of $5 million. When you acquire 10,000 users, set a new goal for 100,000.

Don’t just set challenges for your company; set them for yourself, as well. Read more books, attend more workshops, get to know every team member—whatever it takes to keep you hungry.

3. Don’t follow the money

The more you focus on your personal pocketbook, the fewer opportunities you will have to celebrate success and create long-term goals.

Pursue growth because you want to run a successful company, not because you want to see the numbers on your bottom line grow. For some of the most successful people in the world, the challenge of growth has been more important to their journeys than the monetary successes along the way. Think about Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg; they’re obviously not in it for the money—they can afford anything they want.

Remember, you’re building a company to create something great, not to buy a boat with the profits.

4. Enjoy the journey

You can’t be successful if you hate every day of the work it takes to get there. My “30 Under 30” accomplishment was a big talking point for friends and family. For me, it wasn’t any more important than the achievements I regularly share with my team.

Keep your next challenge in front of you, but remember that building a company is supposed to be fun. It’s not about reaching the end goal of retirement with a billion dollars in the bank; it’s about going into work each day excited to accomplish new things.

When you do that, not only will you establish a culture of growth that will weather any storm, but you’ll have a good time while you do it. I don’t know how old Warren Buffett is, but there’s no way he’s still going strong because he has some larger goal in mind that he has yet to achieve—he just loves the inherent thrill of the chase.

Keep your perspective

Don’t crash into a saturated market assuming you’ll make as much money as everyone else in it. I dove in headfirst and worked hard to build my company, and today, new players hoping to strike it rich are jumping into our space without any idea of how to succeed in this industry.

Not only do those types of people not last long, but they also kill their reputations, which could have helped them start other successful companies if they hadn’t gotten over-eager.

You never know how many chances your company will get, so don’t go all-in blindly. Follow these strategies to approach growth the right way. Fulfill a need, stay excited about growth, run an honest company, and you will find success every day.

Most entrepreneurs don’t begin their journey by falling in love with the problem—they begin by falling in love with the solution.

That is to say, it’s not as common to find someone who sat down and thought, “What business should I start?” Rather, the majority of entrepreneurs recognize a problem that exists and build their business around a solution.

Whether this is a problem they have personally experienced, or something their friends, family, or those in their current industry wish they had access to, these small moments of “man, I wish that existed,” often serve as the spark the inspires a new business.

I asked the entrepreneurs of the Young Entrepreneur Council to share the moments that served as the catalyst that inspired their businesses.  If you’re hoping to become a small business owner, but uncertain where to start, keep your eyes open for similar moments in your own life—it could help you light upon the perfect business idea.

1. They laughed at my idea

For Suneera Madhani, the inspiration to start Fattmerchant, a subscription membership payment processing company, came when she took the idea to her former employers—and they laughed at her.

“For years, I worked in the merchant services industry at a big bank,” says Madhani. “I saw there was a better way to conduct business (without lying to business owners and charging an arm and a leg!) and brought my idea to my bosses. They laughed.”

It was clear to Madhani that if she wanted to pursue her idea, she wouldn’t get any support at her current company, as it disrupted the industry status quo. “I knew the industry needed something new, a provider that was there for the business owner, and their reaction just confirmed I had to do it myself,” she says.

2. I suffered from bad acne

Daisy Jing of Banish had a problem herself, and couldn’t find an effective solution. “I had bad acne and did everything to help clear it up,” says Jing.

However, she didn’t launch her product right away; instead, she became a trusted voice on the subject. “I’ve tried hundreds of different beauty products, then I reviewed them and shared,” she says.

”I then developed a following of over 50 million views on YouTube and became a trusted source of information. At that time, I was able to make my own natural skin care line. Eventually, my followers saw great results on my skin and encouraged me to launch my own business.”

3. There was missing data on our most engaged fans

“As an artist manager for 12 years, I was frustrated that we didn’t know who was in the audience,” says Betsy McHugh of Hurdl, Inc., a platform that collects and analyzes data on audience members from live events. “Even the biggest ticket sellers in the world know less than 20 percent of people at an event.”

McHugh noticed a huge missed opportunity to better understand her clients’ consumer base. “We were missing sales opportunities because you can’t market to people you don’t know,” she says. “I believed bringing the audience into the live-event experience was the solution—and it is.”

4. I noticed that law firm websites weren’t well-designed

Have you ever seen something so poorly executed you thought, “I could do that way better!” That’s how Peter Boyd, a lawyer, began PaperStreet Web Design, which he began as a reaction to the terrible websites law firms used. “I started PaperStreet over 15 years ago because most law firms websites were horrible,” he says. “Actually, many law firm sites are still horrible, but they are getting better collectively.”

He set out to fix the problem himself: “I started by creating websites for law firms, while still practicing law at the same time,” says Boyd. “At a certain point, I simply enjoyed building websites more than giving legal advice, and decided to take the plunge full-time.”

5. As a customer, I was angry

Anger was the driving force behind Benjamin Berman’s foray into entrepreneurship, which led him to start Optimize For Growth, a business management tool.

“I was appalled at how college student customers were being addressed in such a patronizing way by companies stumbling over themselves trying to be cool. Between all the phony ‘dude, bro’ marketing and trashy goods marked up to the extreme, my earlier experience as a customer made me go out and create a place where college kids are treated like real people and sold real goods.”

6. I was looking for freedom

When Bryce Welker had the idea for Crush Empire, he saw it not only as a way to have more control over his life by becoming his own boss, but also as a way to empower those in his industry. “I came up with my business idea while shackled to my desk at an accounting firm,” says Welker. “I wanted the freedom of running my own business, and by starting my website, I could give future CPA exam test takers more freedom in their lives.”

For Welker, this was a win-win—not only did he get to start his own business and work for himself, but his business had the potential to change the lives of others in his field, and improve the industry as a whole. “I knew how to disrupt an industry and realized my experience could help others avoid my mistakes—a win for everyone,” says Welker.

7. I noticed stability—and opportunity—during a crisis

Sometimes it takes a bad situation to highlight the need for a solution—and it was in this way that Luigi Wewege developed the idea for his business, Vivier Group.

“The financial crisis of 2007/08 had little effect on the New Zealand banking sector, due to their much sterner regulation,” he says. “Post-crisis, I began to notice an increase in people from around the world inquiring about the attractive rates offered within the country. Thus, the idea was born to service these international depositors wanting to receive higher interest rates on their savings.”

Keep in mind, of course, that there’s a fine line between exploitation of a crisis and creating something to fill a real need. However, it’s smart thinking to consider how you can potentially create an innovative answer to an existing problem that has arisen out of a crisis.

8. I wanted to help others in my shoes

If you’ve spent days, weeks, or months teaching yourself how to do a difficult task, you’d probably be the first one to speak up if your friend had any questions, or was wondering where to start. Being able to share her extensive knowledge on sales is what inspired Leah Neaderthal to start her business Growthworks Solutions as a way to help other entrepreneurs who were unsure of how to approach the process of selling.

“When I started my first business, I didn’t know anything about sales or selling,” says Leah Neaderthal.  “It took me years of teaching myself, reading everything I could, trying every approach, to truly develop a selling style that worked and didn’t feel sales-y.”

Neaderthal knew she wasn’t the only new entrepreneur who was uncertain how to be their own salesperson. “I know so many other entrepreneurs struggle with this, so my business shortcuts for them what it took me years to learn, so they can grow their businesses too.”

9. I attended a philanthropy concert event

“It started as a fraternity philanthropy concert: I made shirts to sell as a fundraiser and put on a concert,” says Tony Poston of the creation of his business, College Hill Custom Threads.

Though selling t-shirts started out as a way to raise money for a single event, Poston discovered that his new business idea enabled him to fulfill his passion for working with universities, and also allowed him to move back to his college town. “I couldn’t be happier in a small town, living the dream,” he says.

10. I wanted to extend the spirit of holiday giving

If you’ve ever given to a family during the holidays, you know that it feels rewarding to help others in your community. Thomas Doochin of Daymaker wanted to take this spirit of giving even further: “We started Daymaker as a side-project in college to make holiday adopt-a-family more connective and more transparent for our own families’ giving,” he says. “Three weeks after launching, thousands of parents and kids around the country had used the platform for their holiday giving.”

The success was unexpected, but it presented an opportunity for Doochin to continue focusing on brightening the lives of children in need. “We then realized the impact we could have if we catered a giving experience around kids—specifically birthdays.”

11. A patient asked a question

If you constantly hear “I wish you guys did XYZ!” in your industry, this might be a sign that there is a niche you can fill.

“The idea for Opternative came about when a former patient of mine asked the question, ‘Why can’t we do this eye exam at home?’” says Steven Lee of Opternative.

Lee realized how difficult it was to come into the office for eye exams for some his patients, and decided to create a solution to that problem. “My patient was a single mother who found it difficult to visit the clinic for regularly; she required a lot of routine visits to check on her glasses prescription strength, and a system that could be utilized at home was something that would make her life a lot easier.”

What inspired your business idea? Share this article on Facebook or Twitter and let us know, or reach out to me directly @BrianaMorgaine!

Mill Street Treats’ caramel corn. (Image via the Mill Street Treats Facebook page.)

Sometimes, the path to small business success is surprisingly sweet.

At least, it was for John Seeley, founder of Mill Street Treats. A family-owned and operated shop on historic Route 6 in Troy, Pennsylvania, Mill Street Treats sells a variety of flavored popcorns, roasted peanuts, ice cream, and more.

John, who relied on Bplans to help start and plan his business, was kind enough to share the story of Mill Street Treats’ unexpected beginnings and discuss his goals, challenges, and advice for other would-be small business owners.

Small business ambitions and accidental entrepreneurship

For John, starting Mill Street Treats was a natural evolution of his experience as an entrepreneur.

Though he worked as a shop teacher until his retirement in 2013, he had previous experience as a business owner. “I had a small sign shop that I sold when I went back to teaching,” he says. “I made wood crafts, and sold them along the way.”

Starting Mill Street Treats represented the fulfillment of a dream for John. “One of my goals and dreams was to make caramel popcorn,” says John. However, while he’d considered the idea, he didn’t actually set out with the intention of starting Mill Street.

“What I really wanted to be able to do was make caramel popcorn so my three kids could have Christmas gifts to give out, and in a way save them some money,” he explains. “Well, that didn’t exactly unfold that way.”

What John did end up with was a budding business. “I got a good deal on some popcorn equipment, and by chance, I got hold of a really good caramel corn recipe—secret, you know.”

The popcorn was delicious, and with rave reviews from his friends and family, John decided to take his new creation to the next level. “Talking to my popcorn suppliers, I figured out how to make flavored popcorn,” he says. “I used the best ingredients, always going top shelf, because, after all, it was for my friends and family.”

The rest, as they say, was history. “Long story short, my neighbor wrote for our local Pennysaver and she wrote a story [about Mill Street Treats] that came out a week before Thanksgiving in 2013. My son-in-law, who thought I was crazy, was having to finish his day job and help me make popcorn to midnight many nights. By January 1st, we were both excited and exhausted.”

Just like that, Mill Street Treats was born.

Mill Street Treats’ coffee and popcorn offerings. (Image via the Mill Street Treats Facebook page.)

Working with what you have

With a blooming business suddenly on their hands, John and his family had to regroup.

“We saw the business was going to be a business, if you know what I mean,” he says. “On a shoestring, we bought used equipment to add to our repertoire of products: ice cream and roasted peanuts, and roasted coffee. One of the biggest challenges was organizing our efforts.”

As they hadn’t set out with the intention of growing a business, Mill Street Treats took up residence out of a shop that made up the bottom floor of their home. Luckily, the location worked out well, adding to the charm of the business.

John, who lives above the shop, explains: “There was a store space downstairs, and the shop area became our production area. The shop is really a very old building located on Route 6. We chose this location because it was what we had.”

Goals for Mill Street Treats

While the caramel corn business might have been half-long-term-dream, half-happy accident, John and his family have big goals for the continuation of their business.

“We plan for daily action every morning at 7 a.m. ‘coffee time,’” says John. He and his son-in-law, Shane, hope to remodel the entire operation, putting in stainless-steel counters and sinks, and a milkshake area.

While they have big goals, John is confident that they will be able to achieve them. “Shane and I are creative people and like to make things work,” says John.

The challenges of running a business

In some ways, John got lucky with Mill Street Treats.

After all, he hit upon a great product, was able to rely on support from his family to get the business running, and even had the perfect location right underneath him.

However, that isn’t to say that Mill Street Treats hasn’t faced and overcome challenges. For John, the biggest challenge has been dealing with organizing his business, and the fulfillment of the goals they’ve established for Mill Street Caramel Corn. “To pull [our goals] off is a pretty big challenge,” says John. “Taking it one day at a time is a good philosophy.”

Beyond that, Mill Street faces the task of organizing the expansion of their operation. “The goal to remodel and expand operations has taken a lot of time and planning,” he says. “We want to add on, and that is a goal that has been on the burner since we started.”

Image via the Mill Street Treats Facebook page.

A great hook and the right product

What sets Mill Street Treats apart is how unique the business is, both when it comes to product and the means of creation.

“We hit on a product that was unique to our area,” says John. Not only that, but the business has vintage appeal, which has helped make the product stand out. “Our unique ‘hook,’ if you will, is our three antique coffee roasters.”

Mill Street Treats’ success hasn’t just been down to creating a cute, novel product, however. John realized early on the importance of providing a product that his customers actually wanted, rather than simply running with an idea that won’t sell.

“Do your best to sell what the customers want, and not so much what you want to sell the customer,” he says. Luckily for John, he found a product he both wanted to create, and his customers wanted to buy.

John and his son-in-law, Shane, with the Mill Street sign. (Image via the Mill Street Treats Facebook page.)

John’s advice for budding entrepreneurs

1. Find a bookkeeper or accountant early

“[My] advice: Start with an accountant first thing,” says John. The business didn’t use an accountant or bookkeeper from the beginning and is now having to deal with getting all of their financials in order.

“In July, we are hooking up with an account to ‘shake the sheets’ and get our accounting records in line,” says John. However, he recommends that new business owners start the process of finding a bookkeeper and managing the financials as early in the startup phase as possible.

2. Be prepared to work hard and experience the unknown

“You have to give to get,” says John. “Time, money, energy. You’ve got to like to adventure into the wilderness of the unknown and uncertainty.”

If this appeals to you, John believes you’re off to a good start. “If you like that kind of thing, and have a needed or wanted service or product, you can enjoy the trip,” he says.

3. Choose partners you can lean on

John’s partnership with his son-in-law, Shane, has been a good balance for the both of them.

“Shane and I work well together in good situations and in a difficult situation,” says John. He also adds that having someone to share the workload has made the experience of starting a business easier. “I would not want to do it all,” he says. “Neither of us can do as well as when we are both looking and listening to what’s going on around us.”

4. It takes money to make money—but you can get creative

“We—and most startups—don’t have it,” says John, noting the importance of having enough capital in place before you try to get your business off the ground.

However, John argues that if you are “enough of an adventure entrepreneur,” you can bootstrap your business and still achieve success if you have a good product. “The alternative is to wing it with what you have,” he says.

5. Write it down

John is an advocate of planning and argues that by simply writing a business plan, you will set yourself apart from other would-be entrepreneurs content to simply dream about starting a business.

“You have formulated the vision of how to succeed; write it down,” he says. “The business plan you first put down on paper is 20 steps away from the pack of those who dream of starting a business.”

When starting and planning growth for Mill Street Treats, John used Bplans resources to help with the planning process. “While you’re working your ass off every day to keep things going, the business plan I first wrote started to grow,” he says. “It took on a life of its own. Write out your vision with the help of a business plan.”

John Seeley, with Mill Street’s popcorn. (Image via Mill Street Treats Facebook page.)

Drawing inspiration from satisfied customers

John derives inspiration for Mill Street Treats from his parents, who were also small business owners. He is also inspired by his customers; “I love to see the people come into our shop and try our coffee or popcorn or peanuts for the first time, and buy,” he says.

John values the ability to create a positive, enjoyable workplace environment for himself and his family, and emphasizes the importance of creating a great product and having a good time while doing so.

“In a year from now, we want this to be a creative, fun place to work and make money along the way,” says John. “If we are pleased with what and how we are doing, our customers will be too.”

Between January 2015 and January 2016, we grew our platform Slidebean from $1K to $20K in monthly recurring revenue. I’m going to go over the approach that we followed and the most successful growth tactics that we implemented during this period.

If you’re interested in figuring out how you can growth hack your way to success, keep reading!

Just for reference, Slidebean is a SaaS presentation software where users can add content, and a finished presentation is designed automatically.

Getting the first tracks of revenue is one of the toughest processes of building a startup. The chicken-egg issue of getting customers to your platform while you don’t have any money to spare is a puzzle that many companies are unable to figure out at all.

If you’re building a startup, you’re likely to be in one of these two situations:

1. Launching and selling a new product that nobody’s ever heard about, and probably don’t even know they need, or…
2. Improving an existing product or service, which means that you’re going head on against someone with more traction, people, and money than you.

We call growth hacking the process of figuring out this extremely complex puzzle of selling a product better and faster than anyone else. If you can’t do that, then someone is going to outgrow you sooner or later.

In this article, I’ll go through the steps and the strategy we followed to achieve this and successfully solve this maze.

Picking the right team

One of the most commons problems I see with startups that I’ve come across is the lack of a “growth team.”

Let’s face it, working on the product is awesome—seeing it evolve, figuring out new features, and witnessing them as they come alive. Selling a product is a tough process, full of “no’s,” whether they come on the phone with a prospect or as a low conversion rate on your landing page.

I strongly believe that the first few hires of a startup should belong to the growth department, whether they’re marketers, community managers, or salespeople (selling your product is the best way to learn how to improve it).

This is what our hiring landscape looked like over the past year:

Pre-2015, we hired three founders:

• 1x hustler in charge of strategic growth hacking
• 1x hacker in charge of product/development
• 1x hipster working with both product and growth

Then, in 2015, this is who we added to the team:

• Jan-15: Head of Customer Success (growth team)
• Apr-15: Head of Marketing (growth team)
• Jun-15: Community Manager (growth team)
• Aug-15: Head of Sales (growth team)
• Nov-15: Graphic Designer (growth/product)
• Dec-15: Developer (product team)

We spent a year building a solid sales and growth team before we even expanded our product team. My best advice here would be to ensure that the people you hire are able (and willing) to handle a large number of different tasks, that might be far from their original job description.

The reality of growth hacking is that it’s a trial and error process. The faster your try and measure the effectiveness of a growth idea, the faster you’ll make it or break it and be able to move to the next one.

Lean marketing

We approach our growth tactics with a monthly brainstorm session with all the growth team. No idea is bad—we write them all on a blackboard and then select the ones we like best. Our budget for most experiments is $500 to $1K, and we try to run two experiments per month. These may range from joining an affiliate marketing platform to trying new Google AdWords keywords.

This is when metrics come into play. Your customer acquisition cost and lifetime value are the two magical numbers you need to calculate for each one of your campaigns. The cornerstone of any business is that LTV > CAC.

Cost of Acquisition (CAC): The total cost of acquiring a user through a given channel. This includes ads, team costs (fraction of your weekly work hours invested), and any other effort required.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): The potential revenue that you’ll be receiving from a given user. In a SaaS business, this is calculated based on churn. For ecommerce, this is based on transaction size, commission, and chances of the user returning.

If you are measuring these two correctly, you can make simple rules/decisions based on your results:

• If the CAC is over twice the LTV don’t even bother—this channel is likely not going to work.
• If the CAC is above the LTV, but not too much—there’s some potential in this channel. Assign some budget for the next period and keep experimenting.
• If the CAC is equal to or under the LTV, there’s big potential here. Most campaigns can be optimized to increase conversion rates and lower costs. Increase budget for the next period.

Using this approach, we’ve been able to identify a number of profitable customer acquisition channels for Slidebean. Once a channel is identified, we increase its budget by approximately 50 percent each month, until the channel is “depleted.” We call a channel “depleted” when we can no longer get more users from it, or when increasing budget results in an unsustainable LTV-CAC ratio.

There are a number of other variables here like virality (the chances of a user referring another user), but I don’t want to overcomplicate things.

Successful and failed experiments

I’ll be going over some of the tests we did and our results. This is clearly our data, and it might or might not apply to your company. Hopefully, however, it will serve as a guide to planning and budgeting your own tactics.

I’ve also added a note about the potential cost of each campaign, which should help determine if it makes sense for your company.

1. Users who love your product (cheap or free)

It’s no joke that your users are your best advertisers. From day one, your focus needs to be on creating a product that people will love using. People love products that save them a tremendous amount of time or money. They also love beautifully crafted design, or even exclusivity.

We’ve invested a lot in making our users feel like they are our friends. From small details like a friendly and casual tone in all our messaging, to large strategic investments like hosting live 24/7 support, our customers feel like they know us personally, and that gets them to create a deeper connection with our product.

Perhaps the best example of this effort is the care package each of our clients receives when the subscribe: we send them a hand-signed postcard by the team, and a set of stickers. We’ve shipped hundreds of letters around the world and we’ve found that users that received a card churn 50 percent less.

Especially in the early stages, keeping a relationship with your customers can be paid off exponentially, not only in overall engagement but with extremely valuable word of mouth marketing.

2. Masterful onboarding (cheap)

If there’s something that we’re really proud of in Slidebean, it’s our onboarding emails. We’ve been working Intercom for over a year now and they have been key to our success.

Intercom allows you to build drip email campaigns based on specific actions users take on your site. As you evolve your user base, you can get down to tiny details and email users based on very specific actions, which makes them feel you are reaching out to them personally rather than automatically.

For instance, we target users based on their language, the type of customer they are (startups, marketers, consultants, academic) and based on the actions they take on their site. Thanks to Intercom’s powerful tracking and automatic emails, we know when a startup founder finished and shared a deck. We can then email them at the right time to take an action or upgrade their account with a message that is so specifically crafted that they often assume it was only sent to them.

Our onboarding consists of over 200 different emails based on our audiences, and we continue to improve it every week. This optimization results in emails with an open rate greater than 60 percent and a click through rate greater than 20 percent—an unimaginable metric if we were just sending emails blindly.

3. Big press (cheap or free)

While it’s not a sustainable growth channel because you simply can’t get featured every week, kicking off with a major tech press publication definitely helps. While it has a direct impact on traffic it also helps with overall SEO, brand recognition, and it allows you to brag on your website and on your ads, which improves conversion rates.

Nailing an article in a major tech blog is a hit or miss, but I’ve successfully managed to get two of our product launches featured in Techcrunch and TheNextWeb. Getting published is a combination of luck, creativity, and most importantly, relationships.

I keep a spreadsheet of all the reporters I’ve met, emailed, tweeted or had any contact with in any way, and I make it a priority to stay in touch with them every other month or so. The truth is that you can’t simply pitch a reporter over email and expect to be picked up. While it’s worked for me a couple times, you can’t rely on them getting your email or even getting back to you.

For the launch of Slidebean, we came up with a concept to get reporters’ attention through Twitter or Instagram first, and once we were able to interact with them through those channels, we sent them an email. Luckily, we had our team spread across the world and were able to get these (real) shots without spending a fortune:

We selected a few reporters that wrote about our space (had expertise in it) and started shooting pictures through their social networks. Instagram felt like a good idea at first since many of them don’t have a lot of followers and activity, but in the end Twitter gave us better results.

With a nice “Can I email you about Slidebean?” tweet we got a great response rate and moved our conversation to email. The outcome of this? Two major publications on the launch of our platform:

• DreamIt Ventures’ Slidebeam Hopes to Be Instagram for Presentations
• Slidebeam Launches to Give Prezi a Run for Its Money

The press buzz around the launch nailed us about 8,000 signups on the platform in the course of a week and that was all referral traffic from these articles.

One important thing to consider is that these are very targeted audiences: startups, VC’s, and so on. If you are not focused on serving those users, then you might not get a lot of value out of this effort. Also, many of them will just sign up to look around and not come back ever but hey, it’s free traffic!

4. Small press (cheap or free)

It’s significantly easier to get a press mention from smaller bloggers or internet evangelists (Youtube, Scoop.it). They’re usually on the lookout for great content to share on their websites, and it’s easy to get them to feature you if you have a product they like.

Don’t underestimate small blogs! While their communities are much smaller, the engagement rate is significantly higher and they will continue to bring you valuable traffic as time moves on.

5. Google AdWords or SEM (expensive)

We avoided investing in Google AdWords for months because of how expensive it is. Still, it’s become one of our most profitable acquisition channels, and more importantly an excellent way to test new customer verticals and target markets.

Search ads are expensive, however. Be prepared to pay at least $1 per click for any decent keyword in the U.S. (this drops by $0.30-$0.50 in other countries). This means that you need to convert customers very efficiently if you want to get positive unit economics out of it. We found that the best performance we could get out of a landing page was about 40 percent conversion to (free) sign up, which means that a sign-up can’t cost less than about $2.50.

The best way to optimize in Google Adwords is to be extremely specific with your targeting. Build a profile of your ideal customer (Where do they work? How old are they? What do they do? What would they type in a Google search?). In other words, get in your customer’s head and figure out what they’d be looking for.

For example, “presentation software” is an extremely broad keyword phrase that anyone from students to employees of large businesses could enter in Google. On the other hand, we identified that phrases like “pitch deck” that are significantly more specific about their audience: startup founders looking to pitch investors.

Identifying keywords like “pitch deck template” allowed us not only to find positive unit economics in SEM, but to focus our SEO efforts accordingly.

6. Display ads (cheap)

You’ll find that display ads are much cheaper than search ads, and the main reason is the moment of intent. If a person runs a search for “digital cameras,” they’ve already made the decision to purchase one, and it’s just a matter of which one and where to buy it. The moment of intent is clear and the customer is further down the acquisition funnel.

With display ads, you are targeting the customer further away in the acquisition funnel, and at a moment when they are not particularly interested in making a purchase or trying a new product out.

Display ads for sign ups: Fail

We started experimenting with Facebook Ads, which felt significantly cheaper than Google AdWords. We created a set of beautiful designs with a “Sign Up” call to action, only to find that the click through rate never went above 0.5 percent (with Facebook you should aim for at least 1 percent).

This resulted in a $10 cost per sign up, and lower than average activation rates. The reason was simple: We were targeting people while they were procrastinating on Facebook, a terrible time to ask them to go through an onboarding process. We saw similar results with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit ads, and moved on.

Video ads: Fail

We also tried running some Facebook and Youtube video campaigns and saw little success. While the cost per video impression is usually around the $0.05 (and you only get charged if a user sees more than 30 seconds), we saw very little conversion rate from the video to the landing page.

Display ads for content promotion: Success

Eventually, we figured that promoting content through display ads gave us significantly better click through rates, up to three percent or even five percent for some audiences. The reason is clear, while hanging around on social media sites, users are actually consuming content, so it feels more natural to click and read through a piece of content that seems interesting.

Promoting content does not necessarily result in sign ups, so the measure of the success of a content campaign is rather different. It relates to content shares, brand awareness, and even position in search engines, so measuring CAC here can be a whole different challenge.

Retargeting through display and video ads: Success

We also found that running retargeting campaigns was extremely cheap. For the past few months, we’ve been running retargeting ads with a budget of about $500 a month and getting around 750,000 ad impressions in return.

While conversion rates and cost of acquisition through retargeting is not particularly outstanding, we like to think that there’s an underlying, unmeasurable added value of brand exposure that is achieved through retargeting. Honestly, there is no way for us to know that users are converting better because they get to see our ads everywhere, but we’re willing to allocate a fraction of our marketing budget to this cause.

7. Blog or content marketing (cheap or free)

If I could go back in time to when we first launched our product, one of the first things I’d do differently is run a blog from day one. At this point, the Slidebean blog gets around 20,000 visitors per month, and we’ve found that users that convert from the blog are more engaged and stay much longer, resulting in the highest LTV from our current acquisition channels.

Other great startup blogs to look at are Buffer and Baremetrics; blogs have become the main customer acquisition channel for those companies.

Once you have an ideal profile of your customer, it becomes simple and rather obvious to blog about topics that are interesting to those audiences. It gets your brand in front of them; if the content is good it will be organically shared to their peers, and sooner or later users will end up knowing you.

Onboarding and converting blog readers is a much longer process, but by using a combination of retargeting ads with well-crafted email drip campaigns, you can start improving this process. On our blog, we are using SumoMe to aggressively collect emails who we then target with Mailchimp.

8. Reddit (cheap or free)

If you don’t know Reddit, it’s about time you start getting familiar. Reddit is a content sharing community that gets short of 20 million visitors each month. With thousands of sections about specific topics (called subreddits), Reddit is an ideal place to find and engage with target customers.

I’ve never seen a sense of community similar to the one you can find on Reddit, and this is why you’ll need to spend a few weeks getting familiar with the language, tone, and type of publications that get shared and spread in the community. If you’re able to get a hang of it, however, it can become a strong and close to free distribution channel for your product or service.

We “hacked” Reddit by sharing our blog content in the startups, entrepreneurs, and small business subreddits, and making sure it got high visibility. If your content is truly good, you’re looking at a few thousand reads from ideal customer prospects, not to mention the SEO benefit.

9. Twitter and Quora conversations (free)

Twitter and Quora are two great places to find conversations relevant to the problem you’re solving (as a matter of fact if you can’t find any questions or discussions, then you really should reconsider the way you’re positioning your product or service).

Get used to monitoring Twitter conversations around your vertical and try to engage with as many as you can. Make sure to sound interested and casual and avoid just selling your product or pointing people to your landing page. Sometimes it’s better to promote content that you’ve published and only share your product’s homepage when they are explicitly looking for what you have to offer.

A similar situation occurs in Quora. Lurk around the site for any topics that relate to you and jump in to answer as soon as you find something. Also, get your team to upvote and comment on your posts to make sure they get some extra visibility.

10. Instagram and Twitter automation (cheap)

When it comes to community building, you might want to start outside of Facebook. Facebook has become so competitive (and therefore expensive) that your organic reach in the platform is practically zero percent.

We’ve seen great success by hacking Twitter using Buzzsumo and Hootsuite. Buzzsumo lets you find and export a list of Twitter handles that have shared a specific article, and then Hootsuite lets you automatically tweet them a personalized message based on their actions.

For example, we find users who have recently tweeted articles about a specific topic; say, pitch deck design. We export that list as a CSV and then create a spreadsheet with automatic tweets that look something like this:

“@user, noticed you shared that article on pitch deck design. We just published one that you might like as well: link”

With that tweet content, the reader assumes that you actually follow them and are aware of the content they share, and they are significantly more likely to click, favorite, love, or even retweet your post. We then upload the spreadsheet to Hootsuite and batch-post it, 350 tweets at a time.

We do something a little different with Instagram using a tool called Instagress, which allows you to automatically follow, like, or comment on photos with specific hashtags or from specific locations. If you bring Instamole into the mix, you can even automate responses to people who follow specific pages (like your competitors).

This way, you can grow your Instagram user base significantly with only a few bucks, and expose your brand to a network that has literally a 100 percent organic reach. You can find some more details about this hack here.

What growth comes down to

In the end, the success or failure of your marketing campaigns and your startup depends on how fast you can iterate over your growth tactics, and how quick you are to identify the good and the bad channels.

Following this “scientific” approach when testing new growth channels is what allowed us to pick the right campaigns and scale them accordingly. Whether you are on a tight budget or not, the key to growth is identifying these profitable acquisition channels as soon as possible, and being on top of the numbers at all times.

In the end, your metrics will give you the answer. Make it a rule of thumb across your team to keep a tight control on the time they’re spending in each channel and the amount and quality of the traffic you’re getting.

Keep experimenting and keep brainstorming—you are literally in a race to figuring this out before you run out of money, or before your competitor outranks you.

Tori Dunlap and the much younger Tori who bought her business!

When I was nine years old, I never dreamed that the small, quarter vending machine I owned would turn me into a small business owner and a college graduate.

Wanting to inspire a sense of entrepreneurship and business in his daughter, my dad brought home a vending machine he had purchased from a friend. Setting it down in front of me in our living room, he asked—in all seriousness—“Do you want to start a business?”

I owned 15 quarter vending machines by the time I left high school, with all of the profits going toward my college fund. In addition to being a great bonding experience for my family, I cannot tell you how many skills I learned from starting and growing my very own venture that helped me gain responsibility (and looked darn good on every application I’ve ever submitted).

After graduating last month from the University of Portland with focuses in marketing, social media, theater, and entrepreneurship, I am thrilled to pass on my story to fledgling entrepreneurs. Since selling the last of my business at age 21 to a 10-year-old (also named Tori, because that’s just how this crazy world works), I now get to mentor her through the process.

5 skills I learned running my own business:

Here are five things I learned as a kid entrepreneur that set me up for success in a workplace (and beyond).

1) Money management

You think an allowance will help kids learn about how to manage their money? Try being a business owner.

Nine-year-old me would literally roll her profits (I cannot tell you how many quarters my hands have touched over the past decade) and take them to the bank, where I had a checking and savings account in my name.

I had to research the best value product to put in my machine—and the cheapest place to buy it. I had to discover how much or how little product to give per quarter, and how this affected my profit margins. Heck, I had to know what a profit margin was! I had to understand when the correct time to expand (buy another machine) was, and when it was better to hold off.

Understanding both personal and professional finances is one of the most important life lessons to learn—the earlier the better. By having a good grasp on spending, saving, budgets, and margins, you show you’re knowledgeable and responsible with money.

2) Pitching to clients and how to cold call

Nothing’s cuter than a tween (with the assistance of her father) handing you a contract and telling you that she will clean and service a machine every month if you give her rent-free space to place it.

I had to highlight why I was valuable to the business and negotiate (mostly what candy was going to go into each slot!). I had to be fearless and confident—learning these skills at a young age saved me from stuttering through presentations later in life. For most people, cold calling is absolutely terrifying, but learning to get over this fear at a young age has grown my confidence. In fact, I recently took second place at an elevator pitch competition in Denver using my past experiences to inform my confidence.

3) The value of knowing everything about what you’re selling

Ask me anything about three-head, metal Routemaster vending machines and the candy that goes in them. I can tell you what products sell at certain locations, and which ones don’t (Hot Tamales stick together, so place them in air conditioned locations). I can tell you which way the gears turn, and how many M&Ms go in an average handful. I can tell you the best place to put a machine to get the most foot traffic.

I can also tell you the not-so-fun stuff, like which products melt easily, and which ones are especially attractive to rats (the Disgusting Rat Incident of 2011 is a story for another time). I learned all of this and more from experience—and I was able to turn that experience into profit.

Truly understanding what you’re selling displays confidence and credibility, as does truly believing in it. Comprehending the ins and outs of your product and business shines through when speaking with customers and clients.

4) The importance of excellent customer service

Your business (especially your first, and most especially if you’re a kid) doesn’t have to be anything flashy. In fact, I recommend that it shouldn’t be. Owning a dozen or so vending machines was in no way novel or innovative.

What set me apart was my level of customer service. I understood that the way to profit and be a successful business was through serving others, and keeping them satisfied. I set a standard for incredibly personal customer service, and it showed. As a salesman, my father encouraged me to give free samples and constantly check in with my customers at the front desk to see how the machine was working. This personal connection, as well as my incredible story, encouraged my customers to keep coming back.

5) How to deal with rejection

Sometimes, even my cuteness and naiveté couldn’t win them over. For whatever reason, there were times when business owners didn’t have space, already had too many vending machines in their break room, or simply didn’t take me seriously enough.

That’s going to happen. Learning that not every experience in life leads to a “Well, You Tried” trophy taught me that rejection is hard, and it’s going to happen. It’s what you chose to learn from that experience that’s more important.

Throughout the incredible experience of running my own business at a young age (more stories to come!), I learned valuable skills that have helped me in my job, school, and personal life. I know what it means to be a saver, not a spender. I believe in the value of incredible customer service. I chase after clients and opportunities and understand that sometimes things don’t go my way.

With the help of my incredible parents and customers who supported me, I grew up an entrepreneur with skills to keep for the rest of my life.

If your future career involves dentistry, you’re in luck—there are a growing number of opportunities for starting a dental practice.

While routine services like cleanings and filling cavities are always in demand, new research shows a growing number of people are interested in cosmetic dentistry, such as whitening services and implants.

As demand grows, so does the annual salary. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a dentist makes an average of $149,310 a year. The industry is expected to grow 16 percent between 2012 and 2022.

Of course, it takes some significant schooling and a license to practice dentistry, but if you have those two items crossed off your list, starting a dental practice is a real possibility.

For those thinking about this career path, we’ve put together a guide to help you plan, start, and grow your practice. So, if you’re wondering how to open a dental practice, read on.

To get the most important and relevant information, we asked two dental practice owners to help us create this guide.

Dr. Len Tau, owner of the Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence, and Dr. Frank DiCicco, owner of Manhattan-based Central Park South Dentistry, were willing to share some of the lessons they’ve learned along the way.

Starting a dental practice: Planning your business

To open your own dental practice, you need to do some planning. Here are the most crucial aspects of the planning stage:

Write a business plan

As with any business, you need a solid business plan, DiCicco says.

Every owner envisions opening a successful dental practice, but you need an actionable plan to get you there. That’s where a business plan comes in. A business plan describes your business, sets goals, defines your customer base, and addresses finances.

If you need a little help creating a business plan, we have some great resources. Here’s a short list:

• How to Write a Business Plan: A step-by-step article that walks you through writing a plan.
• Free Business Plan Samples: A few examples to give you some ideas.
• LivePlan: Our business planning software that’s designed to help you write a killer business plan.

Create a financial plan

As you create a business plan, you’ll start to put figures together, but Tau says it’s vital to understand your finances before you open your practice.

In particular, he suggests knowing what your overhead will be. Your payroll will be your most expensive line item, so don’t bring on too many people at the beginning. Additionally, start with basic services for phone and internet to keep costs low.

Find the right insurance

Every business needs liability insurance, but the needs of a dental practice are unique. Before you start looking for places to set up shop, talk with an insurance agent about the kind of policies that you’ll need. Make sure this price is factored into your financial plan.

Pick the right location

Take some time to look around at a variety of office locations.

Location is key for dentists, DiCicco says. You want something that’s centrally located, visible, and in an area that your target market spends time in.

Of course, price will play a role in the space you pick, but make sure the spot is right for your practice. It’s better to wait for the right location to come around than it is to open your business sooner in a more remote location.

Talk with someone in the field

Ask other successful dentists if you can pick their brain—it’s one of the best ways to get tips on how to open a dental practice. Find someone who already runs a practice, and ask to come in and see how things work.

You’ll have the skills you need to open a dental practice, but there will be administrative tasks that you might not be familiar with that a current owner can walk you through. For instance, DiCicco says he had no idea how to manage expenses when he first started a practice.

“Everything added up to twice the cost that I expected,” he recalls.

To avoid these pitfalls, find a mentor who can guide you through these issues as they arise.

Starting a dental practice: Marketing your business

Be a good dentist first, but a solid marketer second, Tau says.

You can have the best dental skills in the world, but if no one knows that you’re open for business, you won’t ever get the chance to show your skills—and you might not have success when it comes to opening a dental practice.

Before you open your doors, have a marketing plan in place. Figure out who your clients are and how you’ll attract them to your practice. For the first three years, you’ll need to devote five to seven percent of your collections to marketing.

“It’s not just a drill, fill, and bill business,” Tau says. “Reoccurring patients can only provide so much revenue. New patients are the lifeblood of your practice.”

Here are few marketing options to keep new customers coming in:

Create a user-friendly website

For starters, you need a website that’s appealing, easy to navigate, and offers vital customer information like the business phone number and office hours.

A surprising number of people will drive by your office and then go home and Google your business to see what it’s all about.

Take a look at DiCiccio’s site:

A user-friendly site is a must.

Right on the homepage, you see the phone number and information on how to request a consultation. You want a user-friendly site like this.

Use tools like Google My Business

Google is where it’s at, DiCiccio says, and his business uses as many Google tools as possible.

One of the newest tools you can take advantage of is Google My Business, a free tool that business owners can use to improve their online visibility.

Through the site, you input important information like your office hours, location, and contact information. You can collect and use customer reviews here, too.

Establish a social media presence

To keep your customers engaged when they’re not in your chair, take advantage of social media. Tau makes use of six social media sites, all of which you can access via his website.

While Tau uses a variety of social media platforms, it is important to assess how much time you want to spend on these sites. Social media can eat up your time, so if you only have time to post and update one site it’s okay—just pick the platform that your target audience uses.

Take advantage of word of mouth

While there are a lot of digital options to promote your business, old-fashioned word of mouth still plays a big role in the dentistry world.

If your customers have an enjoyable experience, they’re more likely to recommend you to others. You might consider giving your regular customers a discount for referring a friend or family member.

Find time to network

You practice will run on referrals, DiCicco says. If you want referrals, you need to be active in the community. Join business groups, volunteer in the area, and make sure you’re getting your name out there.

Starting a dental practice: Growing your business

Once your business is established, you’ll shift gears toward growth.

Here are a few tips to make sure your business heads in the right direction:

Hire amazing help

You might not bring on staff immediately, but one of the first staff members you’ll hire will probably be an office assistant or a receptionist.

You’ll want help answering phones, scheduling appointments, and doing other administrative tasks. When you’re ready to hire for this position, make sure you look for someone with impeccable personal skills, Tau suggests.

This is often the first person a customer comes in contact with, so you want him or her to not only make a great first impression, but also guide the patient through the process in a helpful way.

Specialize in an area of dentistry

What is it you like to do as a dentist? You need to answer that question to help refine your skills and clientele.

When you first start, you might try to be the jack-of-all-trades. After all, you want to pay the bills. However, having a focused skill set can improve the longevity of your practice.

“Master the techniques that you enjoy doing and focus on those techniques,” Tau says. “This may mean that you refer some of your clients elsewhere, but that’s okay when you’re growing your business.”

Once you are established in the community, other dentists will refer clients to your practice too.

Listen to your customers

Customer comfort and satisfaction should be at the top of your priority list.

Make sure you cultivate a good relationship with your clients. Take an interest in their lives before you get to work. If a customer is a bit scared, do what you can to make them comfortable. If a customer has feedback, whether it’s good or bad, take it into consideration.

When opening a dental practice, the bottom line is that you want to create a welcoming environment from start to finish, DiCicco says.

Take continuing education classes

You can’t stick with the skills that you learned during your residency; you have to constantly update your skills if you want your practice to grow, Tau says.

Make it a priority to take a certain number of classes each year, attend conferences, and cultivate a group of fellow dentists that you can interact with.

Refine your leadership skills

As you get comfortable with your new practice, you’ll start to bring on employees.

Growth means more responsibilities, including managing people. Just as you continue to work on your technical skills, you need to work on your leadership skills too. Your employees will follow your lead. Your attitude and decision-making process will dictate your company culture.

As you’re selecting classes to continue your education, you should also look into classes or conferences that can bolster your leadership qualities.

Review your business plan

It’s a good idea to review your business plan and see how you’re doing on the goals or milestones that you listed.

If you haven’t hit a certain goal, it’s time to renew your efforts to make it happen. If you’ve scratched a few milestones off of the list, now is a good time to look ahead and create goals for the next stage of your practice.

Make sure each goal is specific and measurable. Giving yourself a generic goal of “growing your business” isn’t enough. Instead, your goal could be to grow your customer base by 10 percent.

Plan for retirement

When you’re initially just focused on opening a dental practice, it can be tough to think about retirement. But, once you’re in the growth phase, you’ll need to plan for the next stage of your life.

“I live for today, but plan for tomorrow,” DiCicco says, who works with a financial adviser to invest in his retirement. He suggests that every owner does the same.

While it may seem as though retirement is far off, if you want to put away a comfortable amount of money, you’ll want to start investing sooner rather than later.

It will take some time to get your practice established in your area, but if you keep your customers happy and work to get referrals, you’ll have a good foundation to build on for years to come.

As the owner, you have a lot of responsibilities, but you also get a lot of perks, too. You work for yourself, set your own schedule, and create lasting relationships with your customers.

In time, you’ll become a successful and trusted member of the business community.

[pullquote]”The thing is, working on your dream should be far more rewarding, right?”[/pullquote]

For a lot of us, the idea of starting a small business is frightening because of the risks. The job you have now might not be the best, but at least it likely feels secure. The thing is, working on your dream should be far more rewarding, right? When working hard on a task, imagine being able to work hard on something that you dream about.

Imagine your work paying off by making your dream a reality, and attaching your name to the final product. This is the advantage of working for yourself. Controlling your product means controlling your destiny. In splitting off and working for yourself, you can continue to do the work you love—and also have control over every aspect of it.

Taking a risk—will it be worth it?

Released in 2001, “Halo: Combat Evolved” revolutionized gaming

A good example of a company that took this risk is Bungie, the video game studio responsible for the revolutionary “Halo” franchise. For most of the 2000’s, Bungie was the brightest star in Microsoft’s lineup. Their “Halo” franchise is one of the best selling video game series of all time, having already sold more than 50 million copies. The story within the game was later adapted to eight novels, several comic series, a graphic novel, numerous action figures, and an anime series.

The original game, “Halo: Combat Evolved,” is considered to have been a massive influence on modern first-person shooters, and the game is routinely referred to as the beginning of modern gaming. With all the success of the “Halo” series, Microsoft paid Bungie a massive contract to continue producing “Halo” games.

And, for nearly eight years, Bungie did just that.

In total, Bungie made five “Halo” games. Microsoft wanted them to continue to do so forever, but the Bungie producers were tired of being stuck in the box of just making the same product over and over. These were artists, top video game designers, that wanted to be able to make the games they wanted to work on, not just what had been selling well.

So, in 2008, Bungie went independent of Microsoft. Still Microsoft contracted them to make “Halo” games exclusively. And once again, Bungie decided they’d had enough. Despite a big contract offer from Microsoft, Bungie backed out of the “Halo” franchise and Microsoft was forced to create a new studio to continue production.

Bungie was risking a lot. Sure, they were an established name in the video gaming world, but that was because of their “Halo” franchise. Leaving that behind could potentially mean giving up millions of dollars in profits and for what? Just to try a project that would have to start from scratch in a crowded gaming lineup? You bet. The personal freedom to create the things they wanted to make was more important than any amount of money.

It meant that finally, they had an opportunity to make a game they wanted to make, and to publish on a variety of platforms—no longer were they stuck producing exclusively for Xbox. Bungie picked up Activision Blizzard to be their publisher, but, unlike their former deal with Microsoft, Bungie would own the rights to all of their franchises—Microsoft having retained the rights to “Halo.”

What happens when you decide to create something new?

So, how would Bungie, out on its own, follow up on such a successful production history for a bigger boss? The answer is “Destiny,” an open-world first-person shooter that Bungie will be releasing in September. Having already once made changes to the gaming style with the release of “Halo: Combat Evolved,” Bungie decided to push the boundaries of the shooter game again. The game has been described as a “shared-world shooter,” combining the elements of the first-person shooter with that of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs).

The game is once again Bungie trying something that is the first of its kind, making it a big risk from a company already risking plenty.

“Destiny” might be a risk, but so far it looks to be one that will pay off massively for Bungie. And how much of this has to do with their control of their product and their drive to create something they wanted to see?

The game, in its promotional demos at E3, looks absolutely gorgeous. The graphics were opened up not just on the next generation Xbox, but also on the Playstation—Bungie’s first work on the graphics-heavy console—and they look great.

Bungie left “Halo” for the chance to create new worlds.

More importantly, however, is the content that fills the impeccably-designed world of Bungie’s futuristic Earth, and Bungie is also receiving rave reviews there. The game is open beta, available to pre-order customers on the Playstation, and has achieved a whole new level of hype, with one Yahoo reviewer calling it “the best game I’ve ever played.” Consumers who accessed the beta agree, at least to a certain extent, and the game has since gone on to receive, according to video gaming site GameZone, the highest number of preorders ever for a first-game franchise title, despite a general decline in game sales in recent years.

While leaving behind a secure job for an unknown future is a risk, you do not advance without taking those risks, regardless of the field or industry you are in.

Assistant coaches become head coaches who become fired head coaches. Music video directors step into the Hollywood spotlight and direct blockbuster bombs. Video game designers decide they want to do more than create worlds for other people, and their games don’t sell.

But, all of those failures don’t mean there aren’t success stories. Bungie’s employees stepped away not just from secure jobs, but jobs that involved making one of the top-selling video game series of all time. They could have been asking, ‘how do we compete with our own legacy?’. Instead, they took a risk and it appears it’s going to pay off.

Have faith in yourself and pursue your ideas relentlessly.

Taking control of your destiny

[pullquote]”It’s a cliche, but ‘choose a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.'”[/pullquote]

That’s the part that is important. It’s a cliche, but “choose a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I can’t tell you that working for yourself is better than working for others—perhaps you would rather have a secure job, doing something you know will succeed – but what I can tell you is that if you have a desire to create the things you imagine, your desire to do this will never die and you will never truly be happy working for someone else.

I want to shape everything—were I a game designer, I would not want to only color the world, I would want to create it. I would want to tell its history, and the history of the characters within it. I would want to decide what sort of world it was, and what sort of adventure it held within its atmosphere. Not have it dictated to me.

I am just as excited as anybody else when my paycheck comes, perhaps more than most as a cash-strapped college kid, but I believe it’s far more important to follow your passion than follow the paychecks.

If you are like me, or like the proud people at Bungie, you want the control to shape your product, and the pride that comes with knowing you are fully responsible for the success it brings. We gamers have been talking about “Halo” for over a decade now. Perhaps, a decade from this article, we will be talking about “Destiny” in the same way.

You could do the same thing for your field. You are capable, and you have ideas—and the world needs new ideas. You don’t have to start a small business to have passion for your job, but imagine the passion of creating something all your own. For Bungie, their own company led to “Destiny.” Imagine what your destiny could be if you ran the show.