Starting and running a business is incredibly difficult.
As a young aspiring entrepreneur a decade ago, I once thought that starting a successful business meant having an exceptional idea, pitching and raising funds from external investors and scaling the business quickly so we can make multi-million dollar exits within five to 10 years.
Me and my co-founder Dinesh succeeded in achieving none of the above.
Our business idea, running a financial publisher that provides content for free while generating revenue from ads, is as traditional a business model as media companies can have. We raised no notable external funding (though we met someone who believed in us enough to give us an angel round to go full-time). And no, we are not exiting the business anytime soon.
But yet, we are here. Providing good finance content for people in Singapore and, most recently, Malaysia (https://dollarsandsense.my/).
Passion Got Us Started, Perseverance Got Us Here
When reflecting on the DollarsAndSense journey, one common trait that has always been brought up is just how passionate the team is when it comes to finance. It is true. Since university, Dinesh and I, along with some of our friends who were early founding team members of DollarsAndSense, have been incredibly passionate about finance. In fact, all of us are still working in finance today.
It’s easy to conclude that passion has brought us to where we are today. However, in my opinion, while passion was important in getting us started, it’s perseverance that has got us there.
You see, running a business that is able to sustain itself (I’m avoiding the word ‘successful’ because there are different definitions of it and what ‘success’ looks like for me may not be the same for you) takes a lot more than just passion and being good in what we are good at. It also requires you to do many things that you are neither good at nor interested in.
For example, processing the monthly payrolls used to be the work I dreaded most at the end of each month, and not because we had any cashflow issues.
Instead, calculating and verifying claims, issuing payslips, requesting and compiling all the invoices from freelancers and vendors, making mandatory employer’s CPF contributions, and paying the salary correctly were things that had to be done at the end of the month. And while they are generally straightforward administrative work, they took, for me at least, a few hours and were usually done on a Saturday when I had more time.
Thankfully, it’s better these days as we have an accountant to help us with these works.
Other matters that we also had to learn and implement on our own include hiring, drafting employment contracts, coming up with HR policies as the team expands and other legal matters. It’s not easy, but to run a company, you have to manage all of these things well.
Truth be told, running a company was much harder than I once thought.
That’s because being good at what you are good at isn’t enough. You have to also be good in areas that you are weak in. Otherwise, your weakness as a founder becomes the company’s weakness.
DollarsAndSense Business Pass – A Platform For Founders To Gain Expertise In Areas That Can Enhance Their Company’s Growth
Given our experience and having spoken to many start-up founders over the past years about their experiences running their companies, we have decided to launch the DollarsAndSense Business Pass. This is a platform for founders to come together and learn from each other’s experiences.
It’s not going to be just a place to mingle. To help all, we will engage experts who can guide us in specific areas. These would include HR practitioners for human resources matters, lawyers for legal issues, accountants and corporate secretaries for compliance-related problems and PR specialists for PR matters.
To facilitate this, we will be organising business events such as workshops and conferences for founders to learn, engage and network with one another. DollarsAndSense will also be committed to producing content through articles, videos and podcasts that can be accessed for free for all DollarsAndSense Business Pass subscribers.
If you are a founder or business leader who believes that DollarsAndSense Business Pass could be useful for you, you can register for the DollarsAndSense Business Pass today. As with most things on DollarsAndSense, this is free and we can keep it that way as we have advertisers willing to support us in this endeavour.
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