Tech Support
What small-business owners need to know about technology.
Andrea Morales/The New York TimesBryan Janczko, founder of Wicked Start.
Hari Kaur has been teaching yoga for 20 years as a private instructor and at other people’s studios, most recently in New York, but it was only late last year that she decided she wanted to start her own Jazz Yoga school — the world’s first, as far as she knew. What she didn’t know was much about how to start and run a business.
But one of her students happened to be an experienced entrepreneur who had recently started his fourth company, and he gave her some smart-sounding advice on funding, marketing and leasing a space. When she came up with more questions, he told her she ought to check out that latest business of his, which happened to be a free online service focused on … how to start a company.
Web-based tools are becoming nearly essential to many aspects of running a business, so why not bring them into the process of creating and executing a business plan? That’s the idea behind Wicked Start, the brain child of Bryan Janeczko, the yoga student. Mr. Janeczko had been a management consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and then on his own, and later did a stint as a vice president at J.P. Morgan. But his real entrepreneurial awakening occurred, he said, when in 2003 he set out to found a company that delivered meals to dieters: “I thought, ‘I’m smart, I have an M.B.A., how hard could this be?’”
You know the answer to that one. “When you work for a company, you have certain well-defined responsibilities,” he said. “When you’re an entrepreneur, you do it all, and from the ground up. You need to deal with the legal work, building a Web site, setting customer service policy. People go into starting a company optimistically, and blindly.”
But against the odds, and not without struggle, Mr. Janeczko steered his Long Island City, N.Y., start-up, called Nu-Kitchen, to sales that doubled annually through 2008, when the company was snatched up by the diet industry giant NutriSystem for a reported initial payment of $4 million. After that he started a nonprofit organization called StartOut to support entrepreneurship within the gay, bisexual, lesbian and transgender community. He also found himself in demand on the speaker circuit and among would-be entrepreneurs as a source of advice — and noticed that he was cautioning people about the same basic mistakes over and over again. That’s what led him to introduce Wicked Start last year.
The heart of Wicked Start is a series of customizable templates for each of 10 steps in starting up a business, running from producing a business plan to raising money to building the company’s infrastructure to marketing, and more. The site automatically tailors the templates to any of several industries, such as brick-and-mortar retail, e-commerce, consulting or food services, covering about 70 percent of start-ups, according to Mr. Janeczko, and users can further customize as needed. Each template lays out action items, including pinning down your business idea and creating PowerPoint presentations to hit up friends and relatives for financing. It goes on to help with taking on partners, setting up a marketing plan and signing a lease. The items prompt you to set deadlines and to create e-mail reminders to nudge you to stay on track. In a sense, it’s a project management tool that’s been thoroughly adapted to the project of getting a company off the ground.
Mr. Janeczko takes pains to point out that he’s not trying to force entrepreneurs to stick to a rigid, one-size-fits-all script. “Only about a third of our users do all the steps in sequence,” he said. For each step, the site also offers advice in various forms, including videos of successful entrepreneurs and other experts talking about what works, as well as community forums and articles. Mr. Janeczko hopes the advice, combined with the template structure, will help company builders avoid making those mistakes he kept hearing about when he was giving out advice.
One common mistake is underestimating how much time and money it takes to get to the point where the company is taking in real money — first-time entrepreneurs are usually off by a factor of at least two, he said. Another is failing to focus the business idea. “People are way too broad about what problem they’re trying to solve or what market they want to address,” he said. “It’s much better to pick a narrow, well-defined problem and market, make it work, and then you can expand it later.” The site pounds away at these points, along with others, such as not wasting marketing funds on paid advertising when there’s so much free marketing to be had via social networks and word of mouth.
Ms. Kaur, the yoga teacher, said Wicked Start, which unveiled an expanded version earlier this month, had been an enormous boon. “I’m a creative person, my weakness is setting up the infrastructure of a business,” she said. “I didn’t know how to find the right computer tools, or how to be able to accept credit cards. I keep coming back to the site for extra help, step by step.” Ms. Kaur opened her studio, Hari NYC, a few months ago, and she says so far she’s stayed with the 60-day plan she set up on Wicked Start, and she’s doing well.
I’ll mention one other tool, though of a different sort, that may be helpful to getting a business going. That’s BizTree, a downloadable trove of document templates intended to shave time and expense off of just about every one of the nuts and bolts required to put a company together and keep it running. There’s no advice or structure to be gained from BizTree, which costs $249.95, but whatever specific task it is you want to do — hire an employee, take on a partner, sign a lease, put together a marketing plan — BizTree will hand you the sort of document you’ll need.
Saul Bienenfeld, who runs a single-lawyer practice with three employees in New York, said that even as a lawyer himself he saved a lot of time adapting BizTree contracts for his own business as well as on behalf of his clients. And he insisted BizTree had helped him head off potential employee hassles by providing him with hiring and firing forms, and an employee handbook that covers everything from sexual harassment to absenteeism to no-smoking policies.
A BizTree document even recently walked him through the process of changing his firm’s name. “I find it a lot easier to do things when I can start off with something on my computer screen, instead of working from scratch,” he said. But he adds that non-lawyers should get BizTree-based legal contracts looked over by a flesh-and-blood lawyer.
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Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a6603f41394a628ea7ff59b6106c233b