No matter who you are, starting a business is difficult. All we have to do is persevere. So what are some inspiring stories about the difficulty of starting a business? Let’s take a look.

An inspirational story about the difficulty of starting a business: A boss started from scratch and had a difficult entrepreneurial journey

When it comes to private business owners, most people will think that they live a high-level life with no worries about food and clothing. In fact, funds It is accumulated step by step, life is improved bit by bit, and the fruits of labor of the bosses are also accumulated through hard work and sweat. This is what I felt most deeply when interviewing Liu Jinzhu. In Jincheng, whenever people make uniforms for work units, people will think of the name Jinzhu Clothing. People in Jincheng not only like Jinzhu Uniforms, but also talk about the boss of this company. There are different versions of Liu Jinzhu's journey from starting from scratch to his current modest success, but when it comes to the entrepreneurial history of Jinzhu Clothing, they all have the same characteristic of hardships and twists and turns.

Childhood Poverty

Liu Jinzhu was born in Tongbai, Henan. His father passed away when he was 5 years old, and his mother also passed away when he was 10 years old. Liu Jinzhu has been dependent on his two sisters and one brother since he was a child. ?I am not like others who live in poverty and live a traditional lifestyle. Although my two sisters are still working in farming, our two brothers received high school and university education respectively. This is thanks to the skills cultivated in my poor family. The kind of character that would rather bend than bend. ?Liu Jinzhu took a puff of cigarette quietly and said thoughtfully.

The poverty of a family without parents is conceivable. Fortunately, he is talented and smart, and his academic performance has always been very good. During the Chinese New Year, every family buys new New Year pictures and puts them on their walls. Their family has never bought a New Year picture, because as long as they have a penny, the brothers and sisters have to save it for living and schooling. But the walls of their home are covered with certificates from his brothers. This is the only thing their family is proud of.

Perhaps it was the encouragement of these awards or the tempering of life. He has since strengthened his belief that no matter how miserable or poor he is, he must find a way of life that is different from ordinary people. He must walk a path that belongs to He has to follow his own path and have a career of his own in the future. This determination and belief has been spurring him on.

His high school life from 1987 to 1990 passed quickly. In the year of graduation, he was successfully admitted to an institution of higher learning, and his grades ranked seventh in the county.

Self-promotion in newspapers

After graduating from college, Liu Jinzhu invited five or six classmates to go south to Guangzhou to explore the market and find their own development path. Each of them arrived in Guangzhou with only enough one-way fare, and when they arrived, they were already mentally prepared to never look back until they made something famous. When they first arrived in Guangzhou, they were overwhelmed by the fierce market competition and fast-paced life. In the days that followed, other students all left home one after another. He was the one who stayed the longest among the classmates who came to Guangzhou. Two years later, he returned to the mainland with rich business management knowledge and advanced market management concepts.

In 1996, Liu Jinzhu came to Jincheng, Shanxi Province. At that time, Jincheng was a strange city to him. Here he came up with an idea. He sent a fax from Jincheng Post Office to Shanxi Daily, asking for a job advertisement. He remembered it clearly: it was the newspaper on May 1st. After the job advertisement was published, there were many people looking for him. Among many merchants, he chose a health care product manufacturer in Huguan. From then on, he stayed in Shanxi and began to have a preliminary concept of the market in Jincheng.

In the days that followed, Liu Jinzhu worked as the vice president of Yi Automobile Co., Ltd. for two years. He came into contact with businesses in Henan, Shandong, Hebei and other places, and he also gained a deeper understanding of the business community. He successively worked as a travel agency assistant, clothing factory department manager, and general manager of a clothing limited liability company. Although Liu Jinzhu's position and department are changing, and the customers and markets he deals with are also changing, his distinctive personality and long-established essential spirit of hard work, honesty and trustworthiness, and daring to innovate have never changed.

Starting his own business

With his understanding of Jincheng and even Shanxi’s clothing market, Liu Jinzhu saw an opportunity that would allow him to flex his muscles. At the beginning of this year, he led some staff to join Dark Horse Co., Ltd. to specialize in clothing projects and created a new clothing brand-dcl clothing.

He invested more than 1 million yuan in purchasing equipment. Many experienced technicians came to him and asked to work in his factory after learning that he was making clothing. After the personnel problem was solved, he began to conduct detailed investigation and research on the market. At that time, the sales of uniforms and uniform clothing in Jincheng were very good, so he immediately changed his career and began to cooperate with his unit to produce and process uniform clothing. Liu Jinzhu personally handles production, sales and operation. With his sales experience in Guangzhou and his perseverance, the products produced by his garment factory have been recognized and praised by the ordering units, and orders are constantly coming to his door.

He seized the potential business opportunities in this market and began to import more advanced equipment. He liberated himself to specialize in researching some production and sales information. With the scale of operation of a small prefecture-level city, he produced products that far exceeded the level of his peers.

Liu Jinzhu said that although there have been too many hardships along the way, he has tempered himself after all, gained a more systematic and comprehensive understanding of the market and management, and is also pushing himself to try to develop new business every day. own career. He said: "I don't want to be a stall keeper." Life is full of choices, and if you hesitate a little, your destiny may change its direction. I want to seize every opportunity that comes to me. ? An inspirational story about the difficulty of starting a business: an entrepreneurial legend from a debt of 200,000 to a net worth of one million

Lost a kindergarten teacher? Job? Started as a dishwasher

Sun Qiuping was born in the 1960s , like most people of that period, she was ordinary and ordinary.

After graduating from high school, she worked as a kindergarten teacher in a corporate kindergarten. But at the end of 1996, the company suddenly informed her that the kindergarten was disbanded due to the company's poor operating conditions.

She was unprepared at the time, and her life suddenly became empty. Not long after she lost her job, her husband was also laid off. The family suddenly had no source of income, and the children were still in school. What should they do to survive? They could only find another job.

She said that at that time, she felt like she had a nightmare. But now looking back on the past, she is also grateful for that period of life. It was washing dishes that laid the foundation for her future development.

From 1997 to 2001, Sun Qiuping started her working career in a Japanese restaurant in a hotel in Changchun with the help of others. She became a dishwasher and could only earn Income of less than 500 yuan.

Became the front office manager in just one year

To this day, she can still remember the first Japanese sentence she learned on the first day she washed dishes in a restaurant, "Wash the dishes" Bring over all the finished plates. On the morning of her first day at work, the Japanese chef, Saburo Kaneda, assigned her tasks in Japanese.

At that time, she had never been exposed to Japanese. After listening to it, she didn’t understand what it meant at all. Kaneda Saburo spoke in Japanese several times, but she still had no reaction. This made Kaneda Saburo very Annoyed, he threw a cooking spoon into the sink and left angrily.

Afterwards, her colleagues in the kitchen told her that the head chef just asked her to bring the plate. Through this incident, she fully realized that she would not be able to work in such an environment without knowing Japanese. In the afternoon of that day, she learned a simple Japanese sentence: "After get off work, please walk slowly." ?When she got off work that day, when she said goodbye to the chef in this blunt Japanese, the chef looked very surprised, and then happily told her in the same blunt Chinese, ?You are a very hard-working Chinese. , there will definitely be development. ?

After that, she worked very hard to learn Japanese, and she spent most of her time after get off work studying Japanese.

When the head chef found out, he began to promote her and taught her some Japanese cooking techniques.

After just one month, she was transferred to the kitchen with her diligence and sensitivity to Japanese cuisine. In nearly a year of working in the kitchen, she basically mastered the methods of Japanese cuisine. At the same time, her diligence was noticed by the Japanese boss, who promoted her to the front office manager of the restaurant in 1998.

By around 2001, this restaurant had become a well-known restaurant in Changchun, and Sun Qiuping's hard work and management experience were also recognized by her peers.

As a result, other restaurants continued to ask her to work there. Some of them actually offered a commission of 5% of the annual gross profit and a salary of 2,000 yuan a month. At that time, her salary was the same as the one they opened. The favorable conditions offered were several times different, but she only had one thought at that time, "This is the place that trained me, but the store didn't want me." ?

I encountered SARS when I opened my own restaurant

At the end of 2001, the owner of this restaurant began to switch to overseas labor and ended the restaurant business in China. Sun Qiuping had to lose her job again.

But at this time, she is different from the unemployed kindergarten teacher 5 years ago. Instead, she is an industry expert with rich experience in Japanese restaurant management.

So she came to another Japanese restaurant in Changchun City as a store manager. However, her management methods were difficult to integrate with the family management business, so she resigned and left after more than a month. Later, she tried several more, but encountered the same problem. In this case, why not open a store by herself and be her own boss? She was determined to do it by herself! Just do it. After a short period of preparation, she borrowed 200,000 yuan from the bank and borrowed it from relatives and friends. After spending some money, he finally opened a Japanese restaurant with an area of ??about 160 square meters on October 5, 2002.

Relying on her management experience and familiarity with the industry, she managed the small shop into a relatively famous Japanese restaurant in Changchun City only one month after its opening. According to her idea, it would take less than a year to pay off the bank loan.

But perhaps fate was deliberately testing her. Just a few months after opening, she encountered the biggest crisis in her career? SARS.

?At that time, there were very few customers every day, even on weekends. There were very few customers in the store, and the company had to lose at least more than 30,000 yuan a month. ?Now she recalls the situation during the SARS period and is still deeply touched.

At that time, many hotels were basically in a bleak business situation, and some were even "vulnerable" and disappeared during this period.

In order to quickly reverse this situation, she began planning to deliver Japanese lunch boxes to various schools and hospitals. Her hard work helped her again. In the first half of 2003, a professor ordered a lunch box from her store. In order to let the professor eat a hot lunch box, she took a taxi to deliver the lunch box from Gay Street. Professor's house.

At that time, the professor was very moved and promoted her lunch box to her colleagues at the school, and her taking a taxi to deliver the lunch box became a well-known story in the industry.

Up to now, many teachers and professors from the college have become friends with her through lunch boxes and have become regular customers in her store.

At the same time, "Taking taxis and delivering packed lunches" also earned her credibility. During that special period, some people still went to her store to eat, and she finally got through that difficult period.

An answer attracted a group of customers

In June 2003, while Sun Qiuping breathed a long sigh of relief, she began to develop her own Japanese restaurant. One of the Japanese guests gave her a great inspiration.

According to her, in June 2003, a Japanese old man came to the store. Before that, this Japanese old man had been to several restaurants in Changchun City, but he felt uncomfortable with them all. Very ideal.

And when others introduced Sun Qiuping's Japanese restaurant to the Japanese old man, the old man didn't take the shop seriously at first. When he came to the shop, he gave Sun Qiuping a "boom".

? Let me ask you a question. If you can answer it, I will dine at your place. What is the most suitable temperature for sake in Japan? In Japan, sake is used to measure whether a restaurant is authentic.

?The human body’s most suitable temperature is 37 degrees Celsius. ?The Japanese old man was very excited when he heard this answer, because the managers of other Japanese restaurants in Changchun he had visited could not answer this question correctly, but after tasting her cooking Finally, the old man gave her the highest and kindest evaluation, "This is the taste of our hometown (Japan)." ?

Since then, the old man would come to her restaurant to taste it every time he came to Changchun, and continued to introduce her restaurant to his friends. With this experience, Sun Qiuping has seen the benefits brought by service details, and has improved the level of the entire restaurant through service details.

Details are everywhere in her restaurant. When she opened the toothpick box, 16 toothpicks were neatly placed in a square shape. The wooden window lattice on the wall had been wiped with almost no trace of dust. Sun Qiuping Said: "Every day she puts on white gloves to check each window lattice to ensure cleanliness. The Japanese attach great importance to the cleanliness of the dining environment, and this should not be underestimated." ?It is through this kind of service that her restaurant has welcomed more customers.

Now, the 200,000 yuan loan Sun Qiuping owed to the bank when she started her business has been fully paid off, and she already has personal assets of nearly 1 million yuan.

And she also has a bigger goal, to double the size of her store on the existing basis, and strive to open the store in Japan.

? The worst case scenario is to start over from scratch?

Reporter: Why do you want to start your own restaurant business?

Sun Qiuping (hereinafter referred to as "Sun"): In my case In the restaurants I have worked in, many service staff are related to the boss, and they cannot tell or give orders at all. In terms of work, I have very high requirements for the quality of employees, and many people will not be able to adapt, so it is difficult to cooperate with these people. The only way is to choose to leave and open my own store.

Reporter: Since you have chosen to open your own store, will you accept the harsh training and management of your store staff?

Sun: They simply cannot accept it. Those who are lazy will become lazy if they are not urged. In order to show their opposition to my management style, they once joined together to go on strike in protest. (Laughs) But I told them that the current strict requirements are not for me personally. You are now a migrant worker. Without strict training and study, you will only be a migrant worker wherever you go. If you can pass the level of my training, no matter where you go in the future, you will have the opportunity to change your destiny. As a result, every employee who was an ordinary employee is now excellent.

Reporter: During the SARS period, there were problems in the operation of your restaurant. Have you ever thought about giving up this industry?

Sun: SARS at that time really brought me a A heavy blow came. I have also thought about whether I can only be a migrant worker and not a boss! But then I thought about it, my Japanese teacher in his 70s could still get the first place in the Chinese postgraduate examination, a man in his 70s , was able to still work hard and get the final success after several failures. I am much younger than her and have more time than her. As long as I work hard, I should be able to succeed, so I gritted my teeth and gritted my teeth. No big deal. Starting all over again, it turns out that if I persisted, I succeeded.

Reporter: In business operations, we pay great attention to the location of our stores. However, your store did not choose to be located on a busy street, but in a small alley. Why did you choose to open it in such a location? How about opening a store in one place?

Sun: I chose to open a Japanese restaurant in such a small alley, not to save costs, but to use all the 6,000 yuan saved every month to purchase Japanese food. of raw materials to ensure the original flavor of Japanese cuisine. Using authentic ingredients to make authentic dishes is one of the reasons why my restaurant is so prosperous.

Reporter: Your clerks are all excellent. Do you have any unique experience in managing clerks?

Sun: There is one very important point in my management, that That is, "working time is working time". You and your employees can only have a relationship between store clerk and boss, and the reward and punishment system is also extremely strict. After the work is over, employees can put forward what they think is unreasonable during the day, and everyone can discuss it together. If what he said makes sense, listen to his opinions at work next time. This will resolve the conflicts between the boss and the clerks at work, and the employees' opinions will also be respected, and they can work harder.

Entrepreneurship Speech

There are always some people in this world who complained five years ago that they did not seize the wealth opportunity ten years ago. Five years later, Today, they start complaining again about not seizing the great opportunity five years ago. I believe that in another five years, they will still complain about not seizing the opportunity today. In fact, there is no shortage of opportunities in this world. There are good opportunities at any time. The key is whether you can detect its existence and then go all out to do it well. As long as you work hard and work hard, it will never be too late. ? An inspirational story about the difficulty of starting a business: Yang Haoyong, CEO of Ganji.com

Impulse to start a business, stumble into growth

Moving the largest classified information website in the United States, Craigslist, to China? This idea is what drives The main reason why Yang Haoyong returned to China to start his own business. At that time, he didn't know anything about the Chinese Internet, but he recognized that classified information websites were a good thing.

I think it (Craigslist) must be valuable if so many people are using it. ?He said, ?Many great products are like this, whether social networking sites or search engines, there is no business model in the early days, but they can help others solve problems. ?

Yang Haoyong didn’t think too much. He just wanted to seize the time to return to China, hoping to take the lead before others took action. After returning to Beijing, he and a part-time student completed the website architecture within two months. In March 2005, the website was launched. But not long after, more than 1,000 classified information websites suddenly emerged across the country. With only 100,000 US dollars in hand, Yang Haoyong had to think about where and how to spend the money.

At that time, most domestic websites followed Craigslist’s lead and set up many city branches to provide a variety of service categories, but they seemed a bit acclimated. Yang Haoyong decided not to roll it out across the country first, but to make a single breakthrough, concentrate resources to expand the Beijing market, and only focus on the three categories of rentals, second-hand goods and dating.

?In the early stages of starting a business, it is better to focus on it. Other cities are out of reach and there is not so much capital. ?In his view, if you want to win, you must use your own strengths to attack others' weaknesses and conquer a "mountain" with all your strength. At that time, among similar websites across the country, only Ganji.com focused on the Beijing market.

Looking back on this entrepreneurial experience, Yang Haoyong admitted that it was not the result of careful calculation. He did not think about making money in the early stage, but just wanted to start operations. ?Entrepreneurs make seemingly impossible things possible. If many things could be seen very clearly at a glance, there might not be so few people doing it, nor would it be possible for only one or two companies to accomplish it in the end. In his opinion, as long as a product is useful and in demand, it will eventually be able to find a business model and realize commercial value.

But in the first four years, Yang Haoyong and his team struggled. What the company lacked was not motivation, but funds. In 2008, Ganji.com encountered a financial crisis when it was financing. Many interested investors gave up investing. However, Yang Haoyong, who finally got a letter of intent, waited for the contract for 11 months.? This pair It’s very difficult for any startup?. Three months before receiving the funds, the money on the company's books had been exhausted, and Yang Haoyong had to lead his employees to do sales and accept advertisements. When it was most difficult to reveal the blame, the company did not lay off employees. Instead, it encouraged employees to go home for vacation, and executives did not receive salaries.

After surviving this trough, China’s Internet ushered in the big trend of group buying in 2012, and Ganji.com also ushered in the peak period of growth, with website traffic increasing sharply. By 2012, the company expanded from a few hundred people to nearly 2,000 people due to new business needs. But for this expansion, Yang Haoyong identified it as a "decision-making error."

Ganji.com, which was involved in the group buying bubble, hurriedly opened a new front even when its main business was not yet profitable. This poses a great challenge to company operations. In just a few months, domestic group buying companies have been fighting fiercely. The group buying business of Ganji.com had to be suspended after 6 months and a large number of employees were laid off.

After experiencing this incident, Yang Haoyong found that the company in the past was too focused on technology and lacked management experience. ?When any startup company is expanding rapidly, it should not only focus on the business itself, but also focus on team building, including organizational processes. This is what I learned at CEIBS. ?He said,?The team must grow with the entrepreneur. If there is a shortcoming, the entire company will be affected. ?

Look inwards rather than looking outside

Now that Ganji.com has gone through several rounds of financing, it no longer has the embarrassment of a lack of funds. What lies ahead of Yang Haoyong is It’s not a question of where is the outlet and what should we do? He seems to have returned to the style he had when he first started his business: focus.

Today, Ganji.com’s classified information business maintains a growth rate of 150%. Yang Haoyong believes that the company can develop many new businesses, but the more important thing is to make its own business bigger and stronger. ?Now it is different from before. We are not thinking more about what new businesses we should get involved in, but how to run a company with thousands of people for a longer period of time and develop it in the long term. ?

In Yang Haoyong’s view, he is already at the forefront, and as long as there are no major mistakes, his business will grow rapidly. However, this era has higher requirements for Internet companies. They must not only have excellent product technology, but more importantly, build excellent teams.

In the past, we always considered how much our performance could grow and which industry we wanted to enter. We rarely looked at what else needed to be changed within the company. Now I think more about whether the organizational structure is reasonable, whether the efficiency is higher, whether the team's talent training can be better, and whether the entire system can be more perfect. ?

Yang Haoyong, who has changed his thinking, has implemented many new measures within the company, such as putting forward new requirements for the direct sales and channel teams of more than 1,000 people. In addition to achieving sales performance, he also needs to put forward new requirements for other aspects of the company. The business exports talents; in the mobile Internet business, the company promotes virtual shares, encourages employees to hold shares internally, and the company buys back shares when it develops to a certain stage, or encourages internal incubation projects to finance; the product research and development part adopts the HRBP system to help everyone The team sorted out talents, formulated incentive mechanisms, and discovered "good ideas" in product design.

As a large company, Ganji.com has also made adjustments to its organizational structure: its product R&D team of hundreds of people is divided into a number of "small teams", with each team maintaining a size of five or six people, with a maximum of No more than 10 people, including a project leader. On the one hand, it facilitates assessment, and on the other hand, it ensures the speed of research and development.

When twenty or thirty people write code together, it is easy to eat from a big pot; if it becomes a small team of several people, if you do not do well, others will feel it, and it will be easier to evaluate.

?At the same time, most projects are promoted on a one- or two-week cycle, which is unimaginable in traditional industries, including the traditional software industry. Yang Haoyong gave an example. Projects that last more than a month in the company are often internal structural reorganization, code reconstruction or major functional development, and senior management must review them; small projects will be very granular to ensure the speed of advancement.

Yang Haoyong delegates the decision-making power of most projects to the team, and only focuses on the promotion of large projects. ?The final KPI and year-end option incentives are linked to project results. I don’t need to supervise what everyone is doing. If the results are good, I will be motivated. ?

As the saying goes, the job of a CEO is to raise money, set directions and find people. For Yang Haoyong, there is now another task: sorting out the process. ?Large company disease? In fact, every company has it, and we will reflect on it every once in a while. ?He said,?Recently we are still studying how to improve efficiency. During the previous period of rapid development of the company, we emphasized risk control and the process should be more standardized. Looking back now, we must emphasize delegation. ?

What is more important than money is the process

Although he has been working in this field for 10 years, Yang Haoyong believes that opportunities in the field of life services have just arrived: through the Internet Platforms organize providers of life services to provide services to users more efficiently. This will be the next big trend. "Life services are a bigger blue ocean than e-commerce." He pointed out that in many mature markets, the output value of life services accounts for more than 70% of GDP, and in China, this number has exceeded 50% for the first time.

Nowadays, Ganji.com has shifted more and more focus to the mobile Internet. This year, the traffic from mobile terminals has exceeded 60%, while this number was only 30% last year.

For some vertical websites that focus on a single business, Ganji.com has had a certain impact. Yang Haoyong attributed the reasons for this "reverse erosion" phenomenon to two points: first, different battlefields, and second, dimensionality reduction attacks. Almost all of Ganji.com's traffic in third- and fourth-tier cities comes from the mobile terminal. In terms of user acquisition costs, It is also lower than some vertical websites.

? Take recruitment as an example. They produce about 20,000 to 40,000 resumes every day, while we add hundreds of thousands of resumes every day. One of the reasons is that we pay attention to the needs of grassroots workers. If we provide a good experience for these users, there will be value. ?The business model of many vertical websites is to charge membership fees, which locks out many users.

Yang Haoyong believes that the platform advantages of classified information websites and the scale effect of complementary and synergistic categories are more obvious. For users, finding a job on the market will generate a certain degree of user stickiness. Later needs for renting, buying a house, and living services will also be solved on it. ?Of the overall revenue of Ganji.com this year, 40-50% comes from recruitment business, and recruitment sales are expected to reach 700 million to 800 million yuan for the whole year.

Most of the more than 1,000 classified information websites that emerged 10 years ago have disappeared, but Yang Haoyong persisted. The reason is a mentality of enjoying the process. The more you do it, the less it will be. Money is the problem?

?No matter how much you earn, you only need a house and a car, eat well, and go out for fun. ?He said,?The purpose is the process. There are various problems in the process of starting a business. Find ways to solve them. I found that many people were using it and found it useful, which brought me back to the original intention of returning to China to start a business. ?