Hi I'm Stephen Peterkins, and this is episode 13 of The Peterkins Podcast.

If you're a person with an entrepreneurial streak, you're probably thinking about when is the right time to start a business.

But there's a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt around jumping ship and taking full responsibility for your own income. There's also the reputational cost associated with a failed business. When starting a company, we think that our timing must be perfect in order to minimize the damage a mistake might cost us.

I have a couple of questions that I ask myself when considering if right now is the correct time to start a business.

The first is, do I have enough resources? The first resource I think about it time. Time is our most precious resource, and often is the hardest and most costly to obtain more. If I need more time, I'll need to look at my commitments and see which ones I can let go of to free up more time.

The commitment that takes up the most amount of time in most of our lives is our jobs. This is where not having any debt becomes such a great advantage. By not having debt, we are not forced into a situation where we were are required to earn a stable income spending time on something we might not consider meaningful or fulfilling.

If I do not have enough money to sustain myself while not making any income (or reduced income working part time), this idea is dead on arrival. Before even thinking about starting a business, we want to have enough money saved in the bank to be able to sustain ourselves for at least a couple of months so that the process doesn't ruin us financially.

If I have enough resources, the only other thing to consider is "do I actually want to build this company, or do I just like the idea of doing it?". We tend to fall in love with the idea of being our own bosses and the freedom that comes with it, but most the work of running a business is not glamorous and is incredibly difficult and sometimes demoralizing. Only through hard work, and quite honestly luck too, will we see any sort of positive results from working on our independent venture.

If we are aware of this, still want to press onwards, and resources aren't an issue, this really is the only barrier standing in the way of starting.

As I've hinted at, the right time to start a business isn't dependent on the market or society or any of that. Thinking that we can time the market, or wait for the perfect time only makes it more likely that we will never get started in the first place.

It's solely dependent on our personal viability and our willingness to do it. When we can and want to start our business, there is nothing left in our way but to just do it.

Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you later.

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