Spent a few days this week at the local chamber of commerce sponsored business start-up courses. The plans to sort out starting a ‘proper’ IT consultancy business seems to have slowed down over the summer so this seemed like a good way of refreshing some momentum.

I wasn’t really expecting to learn much new and I was right, but it was helpful to get a few pages of notes to inform the todo list. Both days were half-day presentations and despite a break felt a bit like a lecture and perhaps could have been a bit more creative in their presentation. While I’m used to concentrating on such lectures, it was clear some were struggling to stay focused and had that glazed ‘wtf?’ look.

The frustrating thing is that I suspect those attendees will ‘just start’ without taking any notice of the information, muddle through and still be a success! Some, perhaps like me, who want to carefully plan may struggle. While it’s always easy to see the causes of failure, it isn’t always so simple to predict the route to success.

At this stage I’m working my way through an ever expanding todo list. I’m a bit worried about doing all the behaviour of a business such as website, cards, networking etc. but not being convinced that’s enough to generate work. I think there is a trap of a cargo cult mentality of mimicking the tasks of running a business to create a functioning business. At the end of the day your only in business because someone pays you. There was a missed opportunity in that if I’d been functioning as a business and was able to offer attendees a quick and simple website with email, half the room would have bought there and then. Oh well.

Apparently to encourage and support the creation of new jobs the government has cut the funding for these free courses. So expect a flush of people starting business with a poor understanding and getting into a painful mess. Nice joined-up thinking there. At least I seemed to get into them just before the cut-off.