Ner­is­sa Gold­en

1) Get paid. A com­pelling rea­son to start a busi­ness is to make mon­ey. Start a busi­ness that earns you mon­ey from the first day, even if it at the on­set you are on­ly able to rein­vest with sup­plies and mar­ket­ing.

2) Start out plan­ning for growth. En­tre­pre­neurs are usu­al­ly thought of as one-per­son op­er­a­tions but why lim­it your­self? Ex­pect to grow. Ex­pect to have em­ploy­ees. Do work that you can­not ex­e­cute by your­self.

3) Solve a prob­lem. Your prob­lem should you choose to ac­knowl­edge it, is that you need a job and no one is hir­ing. Stop the blame game and em­ploy your­self.

4) No lim­its. So your is­land has a pop­u­la­tion of 2000, that's no rea­son not to start your ven­ture. Now you've got the mak­ings for cre­at­ing an "ex­clu­sive" and "high val­ue" prod­uct or ser­vice.

5) Get con­nect­ed. There are oth­ers like you. Find them and sup­port their dream. Team up to pur­chase raw ma­te­ri­als or to ship pack­ages over­seas. Share show­room or of­fice space.

6) Find a men­tor. Why learn every­thing the hard way? Don't be afraid to ask for help and ask ques­tions when you need an­swers.

7) Use tech­nol­o­gy. Even if you are not in­ter­est­ed in go­ing glob­al, you can de­ploy soft­ware and equip­ment to make your busi­ness more ef­fi­cient. Be­ing able to track your sales, ex­pens­es, hours of work will help you to make bet­ter de­ci­sions on how to grow your busi­ness.

8) Solve a big­ger prob­lem. Is there an ob­vi­ous gap in the mar­ket? A fre­quent com­plaint that has earn­ing po­ten­tial? Do the re­search, then solve it for a price.

9) Brag about it. This is not the way most Caribbean peo­ple were raised but if you don't let peo­ple know what you are do­ing, then you are lim­it­ing your op­por­tu­ni­ties to at­tract new cus­tomers and build brand loy­al­ty.

10) Be a pro! I'm not talk­ing about po­si­tion­ing your­self as an ex­pert when you are on­ly get­ting start­ed. Be a re­al pro­fes­sion­al. Show up dai­ly and de­liv­er con­sis­tent­ly good ser­vice, high val­ue and qual­i­ty work to your cus­tomers.

11) Solve an even big­ger prob­lem. When you have an es­tab­lished busi­ness and brand with a loy­al cus­tomer base it gives you lever­age and the re­sources to tack­le those is­sues which have com­mu­ni­ty, so­ciopo­lit­i­cal and glob­al im­pact. Cham­pi­oning a cause should nev­er drain your re­sources or joy. You need to have both to live and thrive.

12) Be a giv­er. Choos­ing to wait to cham­pi­on a cause doesn't ex­clude you from giv­ing to oth­ers even from your first day. When you give to oth­ers (time, mon­ey, ad­vice) you are keep­ing the chan­nels open to re­ceive.

Ner­is­sa Gold­en is an award-win­ning Me­dia Strate­gist, Busi­ness Coach and au­thor who helps her clients ac­cel­er­ate their busi­ness growth by lever­ag­ing high im­pact com­mu­ni­ca­tions so­lu­tions and in­come gen­er­at­ing strate­gies. Get tips on start­ing and grow­ing a busi­ness at www.tru­ly­caribbean.net. Fol­low her on Twit­ter @tru­ly­gold­en.