smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

‘You have to make mistakes in order to become a successful entrepreneur,’ former star of The Apprentice and TV personality Saira Khan tells SmallBusiness.co.uk.

The likes of Alan Sugar, Duncan Bannatyne and Simon Woodroffe, have all admitted to Khan that they made wrong decisions while trying to build their business empires.

Khan founded baby skincare company Miamoo three years ago and admits that when starting out, it was easy to get carried away and spend too much on stock.

‘At the time, I was convinced that people would buy our products to give as gifts. So we had lots of bespoke boxes made for that purpose. I ordered about 5,000 and was certain they would just fly off the shelves straight away – that was one of my biggest business mistakes.

‘The total cost came to around £7,000 and in the last three years we hardly sold any, so the storage came to a lot of money.’

Khan learnt the hard way not to mix friends and business. ‘Because I was doing so much TV work I wasn’t able to keep up with all the admin, so I hired a friend to take some of the workload off me.

‘However, once she started she wasn’t able to do the work properly and wasn’t getting the results. I employed her for seven to eight months, which was just money down the drain. And it was even harder because she was a friend.

‘I realise now that I should have done formal interviews with several different people, or just organised my time better and done the work myself.’

However, Khan has no regrets about leaving the corporate world: ‘[The whole process has] made me realise that you need the freedom that running your own business gives you in order to learn and develop,’ she adds.

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