Broke and roughly two weeks away from needing to find a ‘real’ job, BoardPro Co-Founder and CEO Brett Herkt decided to take a leap of faith on a new startup idea, even though his last left him in major debt and putting pressure on his family. “I’d invested three-and-a-half years of my life and my Co-Founder Kim Thibault had spent maybe a year of hers, trying to keep the first one alive. And it was a huge ask of my wife as we had a A$40,000 overdraft, three young children and were living off nothing,” Brett recalls. “But then Kim and I had another idea pop up. We were bitten by the entrepreneurship bug and had to keep going. We wanted to do our own thing. And incredibly my wife was willing to go again.”
Their “own thing” didn’t come without a bit of hesitation, of course. They were understandably reluctant to keep going. “There’s a little bit of a fear factor once you break out of the normal corporate career,” Brett admits. But hard experience told him this idea was much stronger.
LESSONS LEARNED
Brett had to fail before he could sail in the world of entrepreneurship. Learn from his rookie mistakes with his three tips below.
1. Find and solve a real problem that pays: Ruthlessly hunt for a real problem that needs solving and that people will pay you to solve.
2. Learn your craft: Would you hire someone to do a renovation of your house who wasn’t a qualified builder? No. In the same way, you need to qualify yourself to become a startup entrepreneur, especially if you’re going to try to do high growth and take capital from other people. So spend your free time reading blogs and listening to podcasts.
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