Warm Doors

Starting my own business was one of the best decisions I've ever made. It was also one of the scariest. There's nothing like going from a well paid position with a company you've be employed by for the better part of a decade, to sitting in your basement at a temporary 'desk' made from an old kitchen table, with a laptop, a cell phone and the sinking feeling that maybe this was a mistake. I'm just kidding (mostly), but it is a big adjustment and one of the hardest parts of being a startup is the whole starting up thing. There's a terrifying period when you would expect to be receiving a pay check from work, but nothing is deposited in your bank account. That's because you have to earn the money yourself. To earn money, you need customers, and as a new business, it's not like potential customers and clients have heard of you; it's up to you to go out and hustle up their business. That's probably why the majority of new business failures occur in the first six months or so. Entrepreneurs may have some fantastic ideas, but if they sit back and hope that customers are going to come knocking at their door, looking to spend money, they'll soon run out of operating capital and end up shutting it down.

After my first morning of adjustment, I quickly got down to taking care of the customer situation. From my perspective, there are two main things needed to get a fledgling company off the ground (besides a product or service to sell, of course), and those are:

marketing material

business lists

The two go hand in hand really, and they're the building blocks for developing a customer base. I'm one guy at this point, so I don't have the option of hiring a sales department and even if I did, they still have to start somewhere. A comprehensive database of US businesses is an invaluable tool for tracking down potential clients. Once I'd taken out a membership, I had online access to a database containing over 14 million businesses and 220 million consumers in this country. I can search by hundreds of different criteria or options, including narrowing down my list of potential leads by geography, business size (by number of employees), industry, revenue and I can even determine if a specific location is a branch office or the firm's headquarters.

By my second day, I had business cards in hand and was using that cell phone to call leads I'd already identified. Because the data was current and accurate, I soon had that critical component to success: customers.