NaturCert is a company I started in February 2008 from Athens, Greece with the aim of offering sustainability certification to the tourism industry. It was my second company, and unfortunately I had to close it 3 years later, in early 2011.

I did many mistakes, MANY!, I learnt tremendously from my mistakes and I am sharing the lessons I learnt here with this post in order to help future young entrepreneurs to avoid similar mistakes.

So I will try to be as "raw" as possible to help you understand the importance of those lessons :-)

I started the company based on an idea I had: to sell an independent & private sustainability certification system/product for each segment of the tourism industry (i.e. hotels, travel agents, tour operators, PCO/MICE, Sea transport etc.).

The company would provide the certification consulting through a large network of international consulting partners, and the certification auditing through an equally large network of independent auditors and auditing entities. 

Seven months after we started, we had the global hit with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the start of the recession which gradually was making things worse for the tourism industry, pushing the green/sustainability agenda further to the back of the priorities list of our potential clients. Mainly the hotels...

The future started to look a bit blurry from that point but I was too inexperienced and I had too little knowledge of business & management for being able to understand it and see the end coming.

This market was not a huge one globally but it surely fitted more than 1-2 key players. There were nearly 1 Mil. travel & hospitality companies that could be targeted, easily leading to a market size between 0,5 - 1 Bil. Euros.

There were not that many players in this market but from 2008 we saw hundreds of them popping up like mushrooms in every possible country in the world.

So in our best and most optimistic view we could expect to have 20% of this international niche market, thus aiming to hit at some point an annual turnover of around 200 Mil. EUR. 

All of that sounds probably OK to you..right !!?

Well the truth always lies in the details, so here they are:

Lessons learned:

I won't go through all the lessons I learnt, just some key lessons which are worth noting:

1. Expert advice: Lets face it, do you really think you have all the (correct) answers...?
2. Investment: Investing your own savings and borrowing from friends and family is just wrong. There is a tremendously huge ecosystem of investors of all types and sizes. Just go there! If none of them accept it, then you may reconsider it as there has to be something wrong with it...really! And don't think that they don't give you money because your idea is so amazing that they simply don't get it!
3. Market research: Reading about a trend in magazines, blogs and newsletters doesn't constitute market research....journalists and bloggers get more readers when they write nice stories regardless if they are true or not, and most of them have some direct or indirect hidden interests behind these stories.
4. Customers: How on earth does one start a business without having run some beta/pre-launch research and simple surveying potential clients? Just because it feels right it doesn't mean it is right... 
5. Pricing: Did you even care to calculate the margins (fixed costs/variable costs), the cost of sales, the economies of scale....? Additionally did you ask the potential customers if they would like to add a new annual cost of around 3.000 EUR in to their budgets which also forces them to change some key operational processes? 
6. Sales: So you want to create a global network of re-sellers/partners. Have you estimated how much investment, resources and time this requires? Who is and who is not the correct partner? Channels for finding them?
7. Marketing: Any idea on how you will reach out to the potential customers? or just spamming and trying to meet them at B2B fairs is good enough?
8. Fail fast: 12 - 18 months is more than enough to see whether you can or can not make this work. No need to wait for the 36th month... :-)