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My Business Life... to date.

Every single one of us has a story to tell about their lives, this one is a fairly terse story about my business life and how I came about to being where I am today.

Round #1
Business started early for me, at the age of 11, I was and still am an avid flying model aircraft builder. I decided to sell simple indoor model aircraft made of tissue paper and stick balsawood for a megre $1.00 Australian per plane to my school friends. Considering it was costing me $0.20 in materials to build I thought that 80c wasn't a bad profit and it certainly bought a lot of lollies at the corner store.
It wasn't glory for long though, customer happiness of having a plane quickly turned sour when they found that these planes are hard to fly and break quickly, worst of all I couldn't even run and hide from them, apathy just wasn't working for me this time around. A series of refunds later and I found myself having to dig into my own piggybank savings to avoid the schoolyard beatings. Net result; money was lost, bruises were gained and my profit consumption rotted my teeth. Just to add insult to injury no one wanting to buy things off me again for a while, a great start in the world of business. Lesson learned;

• Spending all your profits too soon is bad for long term business survivability.
• The customer is always right.
• React quickly to customer complaints.
• A bad reputation will sink your business.

Round #2
Junior highschool. Electronics is a fantastic hobby, it taught me a lot of things, most of which I now barely remember without the assistance of a reference book. At some point I came across a great little wireless FM transmitter (bug) kit that I could build which offered fantastic reception at nearly 100m of range on a common FM radio. I could obtain the kits for less than $10, build them and sell them for $20 to the richer kids at school. Every kit sold allowed me to buy another kit and make $10 profit, not too bad at all.
The units were simple to operate, the worked well and everyone was generally happy. One day I got an order for 5 kits, a "I'll pay you later" proposition from a friend. Being enthusiastic to please the customer I went right ahead and ordered all 5 kits and built them, come time for delivery and payment the friend refused saying "I've changed my mind", at about the same time the "fad" of having these wireless FM microphones had died off - great, now I was in dead water with $50 worth of kits that no one wanted.
Lessons learned;

• Don't be hasty getting stock or spending money on a whim or a verbal agreement.
• Your market is not always unlimited.
• Fads will die out, know when to stop.

Round #3
Almost every University student needs a side job at some point, I decided to invest a moderate sum of money and buy a laser printer (which wasn't a cheap item back them) and provide book and letterhead printing services. Things were busy, I was having to stay up till 3am some nights just to get the books printed out for the next day but the money was rolling in.
Things started to come unstuck however when the number of jobs started to exceed my throughput capacity, worse, some jobs were priority items but I only had one printer so was unable to at that stage interrupt a job midsequence and get the priority item out. Disaster really struck when it came to renew my resources. I had failed to check on the cost of consumables when I did my original costing and pricing, net result was a zero profit situation.
Lessons learned;

• Ensure you have sufficient production capacity before taking on more jobs
• Ensure you have a plan for expansion if required
• Factor in all potential costs and consumables and then add some overhead for unexpected items

Round #4
By you would start to think that most of the big lessons have been learned, sadly not. With University behind me I started a 9-5 job (something I was never keen on) and moonlighted doing software development for a quick talking and impressive sounding client. 12 months of development and I had some great products finished for the client, things worked well and they reduced a 3 day manual job down to 3 seconds on the computer. Only one person bought a copy. What went wrong here is that the software was developed for a specific market and there was only one customer within my direct reach, to get to the others required a global marketing strategy which simply wasn't viable at the time (before the days high internet usage).
Lessons learned;

• A good product is no good without good marketing
• Do research into your market size

Round #5
With 9-5 work starting to really get to me, I ran off on a lucky chance opportunity to work in South Africa. The pay was excellent, the experiences were irreplacible the lifestyle was incredible to say the very least. This was the dot-com era and as an IT person it was a ride of a lifetime. My hours were stipulated to be 9-5 but I found myself doing more like 6am - 10pm, each night was finished up with a trip to the 24/7 cafe` for a delightful dinner and mingling with other extrodinary people. I was wealthy, I enjoyed the challenges and I was burning through money like it would never end.
A few years on, the company collapsed from mismanagement, my visa was marked to expire, I still had quite a lot of savings (along with a house and BMW car). I hung on desperately for an additional 9 months, burning through my savings to keep up my lifestyle, in the end I had to leave. When I returned home to Australia I was left with no house, no car, no equipment and a resulting huge debt.
Lessons learned;

• Enjoy your life and experiences, you never know when things will change
• Know when to remove yourself from a situation
• Be realistic about your lifestyle options
• Have a backup plan and stick to it

Round #6
Back home in Australia I had one item left on my business/work options. In order to make things work I needed to drastically change my lifestyle and 'struggle' for a bit. I spent the next 2 years building Xamime with little more than a cheap home PC while living under my parents roof. Xamime turned into a great success and to this day provides a solid income. It's amazing what can be achieved with minimal equipment when one really has no other choices, consider to yourself the true meaning of 'need' next time you say "I need this!". Lessons learned;

• Be prepared to start from scratch
• There's no harm in being humble and accepting help from others (especially parents!)

Currently...
At the time of writing, I'm running 3 separate types of business, all of them supported from within 2 small rooms in a house located in a nice country town located slightly inland in the great North Queensland (Australia).