Ever dreamed of ditching the day job and starting out on your own? Author and entrepreneur Carl Reader gives us the inside track on turning your professional dreams into reality, from shifting your mindset to the need-to-know practicalities of running your own business.

By his own admission, Carl Reader’s journey into business was not traditional. He left school at 15 for a Youth Training Scheme in hairdressing and, when that didn’t work out, he applied for any job vacancy that he saw in the newspaper.

After falling into accountancy “by accident”, he played to his strengths and started prospecting new clients. He built a sales team around him, then a marketing team. He joined a new firm, eventually bought it out and then expanded it into an award-winning business with a multi-million-dollar turnover. He’s since been seated at the boardroom tables of countless businesses, and advised thousands more along the way.

It’s unconventional but, as he explains in his new book, Boss It, there is no one path to starting out in business. There are far more ways to be your own boss than many people realise. Read on to discover what kind of boss you want to be.

What are the most common mental blocks for people wanting to start their own business?

The first key limitation is in our academic system. That’s at the heart of what this book is about. At school, business studies was all about the very biggest companies, the FTSE 100, share prices, big glass buildings. It wasn’t about the reality of buying something for a fiver and selling it for a tenner.

The second thing is that people believe it’s not for people like them. They think that there’s some extraordinary talent or entrepreneurial spirit needed, which isn’t true at all. You see business owners out there of all shapes and sizes: tattoo artists, gardeners, lawyers, architects – whether it’s just themselves or they’re employing 500 people. There’s no particular experience, family background, race, age or gender that comes into play.

So there are infinite ways to run a business, and infinite types of people that can own one. Is there anything central that everyone who owns a business needs to have?

The first crucial thing is to believe in their idea, in their own ability and in their team. Second is being able to communicate what you do, how you do it and why you do it with your team, with customers, with suppliers and so on.

One of the biggest challenges most businesses have is a lack of persistence, consistency and application. They start off with something, things don’t go too well, so they decide it doesn’t work. They need to commit.

What does it usually look like when someone decides to take the plunge and start a business?

For any business, there needs to be a really strong dream that’s compelling enough for the business owner to get out of bed a couple of years down the line. Often the bar for that dream is set too low. Someone might dream of opening a bakery on their high street but, once they’ve done that, that’s their dream gone. It becomes another day job. The dream has to be engrossing enough to keep business owners going, but not too abstract or big-picture to put them off.

Your usual working day must be incredibly varied – how has it changed this year, and how do you see working changing in the future?

I’ve been used to working remotely for some time. My typical work day has always been very here, there and everywhere. A good proportion of what I do is speaking on a stage, so now I’m mostly behind a computer screen presenting via webinar.

After this year, I do think that businesses will look to adopt shared space. We’re societal beings, and teams work better with that human connection. It’s all well and good talking over digital platforms, but it doesn’t replace sitting down face to face and getting something done.

I think that we’ll have this hybrid working relationship, thanks to the mutual desires of employers and employees. Employees wanting to keep hold of the control they have, and employers enjoy seeing the increase in performance. Full-time offices aren’t justified when they’re not fully utilized. That’s where shared offices will form a part of the future.

Do you have ambitions to front your own business? Find out how Regus can get you started