There is an awful lot written about what you need to do to succeed. Determination, passion, hard work, learning from mistakes, customer service, etc. etc.. There are plenty of people out there with these qualities who never make it & one of the big reasons is they are not prepared to sacrifice to get where they want to be. I guess few like to write about the really tough stuff when it comes to starting a business from scratch.

Few people would downsize their home, sell their car, work weekends and holidays, see their family less, stop buying new clothes, miss the big game on TV or even sleep less to reach their goals. Yet, unfortunately, more often than not this is what people need to do to get on top.

Eric Thomas, the ‘Hip-Hop Preacher’ is a motivational speaker. He sums the above up nicely by saying “When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe … THEN you’ll be successful”. When you want to make your startup work, more than you want life’s luxuries like TV, holidays, a nice car, etc. then you are far more likely to make it work.

Creature comforts & startups don't mix

This is one of the big reasons, in my opinion, why most successful entrepreneurs are young (18-30). Students are already doing without, living on a tight budget, sleeping in a tiny studio … so it is far less sacrifice for a student than it is for someone who has tasted the comfort of a regular pay-cheque, owned a nice car or lived in a nice home. People who have had a decent job almost always end up with a bunch of liabilities that prevent them from taking risks. Higher rent payments, car payments, a credit card … all things which are hard to sacrifice in order to make a start-up business get off the ground.

Lets be clear, the higher your living costs the more difficult it will be to take the leap and persist long enough for you to learn the intricacies of your business and gain traction. That is unless you have a large pot of savings to fall back on during the inevitable difficult patches … which nearly no-one has.

So how can you increase your chances? It is easy to write down, but very hard to implement. Reduce your liabilities and outgoings as low as possible, and save as much as possible! Debt must be one of the biggest worries that prevents people from starting a business, so try to eliminate yours. Go without. You don’t need a nice car – I sold a 9-month old car and bought a £2000 boring one to give me some extra cash when starting a business for the second time (even when technically I was a millionaire!). Sell things you don’t need on eBay, stop having expensive nights out, eat at home & cook for yourself … even get a part-time job to do on the side of your start-up to reduce the burden on your fledgling company.

The longer you can survive and keep your business running, the more likely it will start to take off. Plenty of people have the perseverance and commons sense to make this happen … but can you also make the sacrifices required to last long enough?