I’m thinking of starting a new business in a new industry. Help!

I’m thinking of re-inventing myself by starting a new business in a new industry. What chance do I have of success?

I caught up for coffee this week with an old friend, Kirsty. Two years ago she sold her business – a small professional services firm – and started a new business in a completely different industry.

In the last two years Kirsty has gone from complete newbie to industry expert and she is poised to replicate her success overseas. As we shared lattes and stories I got to thinking about how Kirsty had achieved the sort of success, twice, that eludes so many even just the once. I skinned it down to these three things:

Determination. It was a big deal for Kirsty to reinvent herself. Giving up her very successful professional services business to pursue a more interesting venture took guts, and there was no way on earth that Kirsty was going to allow it to fail. As Dale Carnegie said: “Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.” I think Kirsty would acknowledge that most people thought she was crackers to give up her business and would have had placed her firmly in that “no hope” category. But Kirsty had clear goals and set out in almost terrier-like pursuit of them.

Decisiveness. Kirsty has always been decisive. She’s good at amassing just enough information to enable her to make quick decisions. And when she’s made a decision, it’s full steam ahead. A source of Kirsty’s strength is the large network she has not only built but also educated – and that’s the key. Kirsty’s network has absolute clarity about what she is trying to achieve and hence provides, sometimes subconsciously, much of the information she needs for decision-making.

Discipline. Kirsty is the person who does the stuff that the rest of us know we should do but shamefully don’t get around to. She’s the one who makes the tough phone calls, who cascades her goals into weekly deliverables and who is always, always on top of her numbers.

It’s almost disappointing that there is no magic secret to Kirsty’s success. But I’ve looked and I really don’t think there is one. Seeing Kirsty in action over the years has led me to believe that it’s quite simple: Kirsty knows what she wants to achieve and she is tenacious in making it happen. It’s just the tenacious bit that’s hard to do…

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses:Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business” and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).