How to run multiple businesses at the same time?

Serial entrepreneurs can run and manage multiple businesses at the same time by following these tips…

As a serial entrepreneur, you have multiple business. But knowing how to chose the best niche for your next business, how to make the physical management process as efficient as possible and  how to protect each business from your others in a legal capacity is, well difficult. So listen to this episode of the Startup Stream Serial Entrepreneur Podcast to find out how…

Let’s begin…

Use the same location to run multiple businesses

The first tip for you today, which will help with efficiency, is making sure as much as possible that you can run your businesses from the same physical location. This ensures you won’t be wasting precious time each day travelling to and from work places.

As an example, this also allows you to share resources and even staff. If you have two businesses, do both really need their own printer, do both need their own bathroom, do both need their own HR representative?

That’s right, you can also overlap the functions your staff play between businesses. You can also do this with your hiring team, maintenance, office managers… and if one of your businesses relies on one specific profession, as in our case at Startup Streams , where we have professional designers and developers; if I had another business which doesn’t need a full time developer or designer, my new business could borrow their skills, at least to help launching the new branding and website. What’s more, I am sure that your staff in this situation will welcome the opportunity to work on other projects outside of their usual day-to-day.

Prioritise interlocking niches

Imagine if you can work on one business, but it in fact helps all of the businesses that you own? Well this can be achieved with interlocking business niches. We preach this a lot at Startup Streams. We sell pre-made ready-to-grow businesses for sale at StartupStreams.com, and we offer a lifetime membership whereby any entrepreneur can startup as many of our businesses as they want for life. We often get asked by our members for advice referring to which business they should chose to startup second. Our advice is always choose an interlocking niche.

For example, if a member started up a fitness store first, their second store could be the Keto diet, healthy eating or weight loss niches stores. They can then cross promote their new business from their existing store. As you may have heard me say in a previous podcast, “the people most likely to buy from you in the world are those who already have”. So with an interlocking niche, you can turn past customers into repeat customers, but with your second business.

Prioritise your attention

For the next tip, it’s a simple one. You will need to actionably prioritise which business needs to take up the majority of your time, or do you equally split your time? When you startup a second business, the activities associated with starting up will be more in the beginning than the time to run your business daily, especially if you plan on hiring a reliable operations manager to take care of the day-to-day. Only you can choose how you go about doing this, but I recommend our previous podcasts; one called “How to find time to start your next business” and the second, “How does Elon Musk manage his time?” for more time management tips.

Carrying on…

Make sure each business is a separate entity

This is a point I learnt from a recorded interview with Virgin founder, Sir Richard Branson. Believe it not, the Virgin Group owns over 400 companies. Wow - Branson is the living embodiment of a serial entrepreneur it seems.

What Branson does well, is to make sure that each business pursuit is its own separate entity, and not all under one roof, so to speak. This is so that if one business goes under, as was the case with Virgin Cola, the rest of the businesses don’t suffer as a result. Each business is legally protected from the rest.

I am sure that Branson was relieved that Virgin Atlantic wasn’t affiliated with his other 399 businesses when they asked for a Government bail out during the lock down period associated with the pandemic, when no one was travelling.

So the takeaway point here is, when launching a new product or service at your first business, is it wise to do so under the same banner, or launch it as a separate legal entity? It may be worth considering if it is high risk.

Of course, doing so will have more red tape involved, but I’ll leave you to make the best call for yourself.