Start a Business or Start a Company?

Business Startups Malaysia delves in to find out which is more important and what it means to entrepreneurs.

Should we start a business first or should we start a company first? Now this is an interesting question. And one that many first-time entrepreneurs get it wrong. Myself included.

From personal experience, and in retrospect, I would definitely recommend that entrepreneurs start a business first; or at least have a working business model, before consider making your business legal. We have to realise that merely incorporating a legal entity like a partnership or company does not mean you have a business. A business is more than just having a legal entity with a nice sophisticated name and attractive name card.

In my case, my partners and I had a vague idea of what our business would be. We were excited. We were bullish. And we eagerly registered a company with a fancy name. Got our name cards. Set up our company website. And then ... nothing happened. We spent a lot of money setting everything up except our business; our real business.

You see, we were 'decorating'. We were 'decorating' a home (the business) we had not even established. We did not have a working product. We did not get commitments from our suppliers. And we did not have a clear and concise marketing plan. We were shooting in the dark. In the end, we huffed and puffed for nothing. Failure to launch.

Looking back ... we should not have registered our company or set up our website or even printed our name cards until we had a working product and beta tested it in the market. We should have gauged how well our product would do in the market by offering a open, time-limited, free trial. We should have asked for beta tester comments. We should have done our homework and identified our suppliers and estimated our costs. We should have narrowed down our customer profile from our beta release and developed a more precise marketing plan. Instead we enjoyed selecting our brand logo. Selecting our corporate colour, our corporate font and all other little details that were, in perspective, just nonsense.

We lost money, but more importantly we lose momentum, we lost confidence and we lost faith ... for a while. Entrepreneurs feed on momentum, on confidence and on hope. We didn't have any.
But we learned not to give up. We also learned our lessons, we realise that there are and will be more lessons to learn.

So for entrepreneur-wannabes, my advice to you, here, at Business Startups Malaysia, is ... start your business first. If the signs are positive that you have struck something that will work ... then and only then, register your business.