One of the most used excuses for not starting up a business is that people can’t afford it.

But is this a legitimate excuse?

How much money do you really need to start a business?

According to Inc. here is a breakdown of the 500 fasting growing companies from the past year and how much capital they started with:

  • Less than $5000  49%
  • $5000 – $10,000   10%
  • $10,000 – $49,999   15%
  • $50,000 – $100,000   12%
  • More than $100,000   14%

Did you notice that?

Almost half of them started with less than $5000.

It’s also important to note that less than 4% of these businesses received funding from angel investors.

Do you have a business idea that you don’t think you can afford to start?

I know for Karen and I, we never imagined that we could own our own business, but we started small and were able to bootstrap ourselves from there.

We placed an ad in the local paper to make some extra cash and were able to get started with a handful of clients.

One ad turned into two and then three.  Over time, we had our website created and started a more effective marketing strategy, enabling us to gradually build our business over a couple of years until we were able to launch full-time early last year.

We were then able to use money from the business to convert our garage into a home office, giving us a more professional environment to meet with clients.

Over four and a half years, we’ve started from scratch and been able to build a reasonably profitable business that utilises our skills to help people from all around Australia (and occasionally overseas) find meaningful work.

And we absolutely love it.

I don’t share this because we’re amazing entrepreneurs or have it all together because that’s not us.

Growing up, neither Karen or I had role-models who owned their own businesses and we could not have possibly imagined working for ourselves.

There were a long list of excuses that we could have made, including the fact that we didn’t have enough money to start.

It turns out that this was a bogus excuse.

I know that some businesses need a lot of money to start, but the fact remains that almost half of the fastest growing enterprises over the past year only started with less than $5,000.

So, if you have a business idea, how much do you need to start?

Because it may be less than you think!

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