Opinion: Top 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started My Own Business

1. However much money you think you'll need to start a business, you should take that number and double it

I thought I had strategically planned every penny when I first started, but I had no idea that there would be so many unanticipated costs. Since we have a home office, I use temporary commercial office space and conference solutions for meetings and demonstrations. We always like to buy lunch for our clients, and we like them to lunch well.

By the time everything is factored in, depending on how many people will be at lunch, you could be looking at a cool grand just as a baseline. Being a good host is very important, and it's something that in my mind should not be skimped on, but it's expensive. These costs are just a few; we have also incurred other unexpected expenses from things like travel to business taxes.

2. Doing business with friends should be approached very carefully

I have lost a friend because of a business deal gone wrong. Hopefully it will be the only one, but it did happen. Had I thought about it beforehand, the situation may have been avoided. When you do business with friends, you tend to think of contracts as unnecessary, but they are very necessary.

Nobody wants to go back and forth on a contract with a friend; you start to feel like you're saying you don't trust them. It's like asking someone to marry you, and then asking them to sign a prenuptial agreement. What happened to the trust? I'm not saying it's true for marriage, but a contract is absolutely necessary for a business agreement, no matter how close you are to the person on the other end of the deal.

3. Be cautious about deals with payment on the back end

We seem to get a lot of this type of proposition; it might be because we are such a small company, and thus we're taken a little less seriously, or maybe it's because we look like suckers, I don't know. Either way, we are often approached by people who want us to revamp, port, or update their game, and they'll pay us "when the game makes money".

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