So it looks like my new venture made its first sale this week. And I can’t tell you how excited about it I was. It’s not so much the money (they’re getting it for a song, because we need to build a customer base). But there’s just something about that very first sale. It’s the moment when something that started life as a random thought process inside your head suddenly becomes something of value, something for which someone is actually prepared to pay perfectly good cash. For me, it’s perhaps the most exciting bit about being an entrepreneur.

I still remember very vividly the first sale I made in the original business. It was basically just me persuading someone I knew to let me tell them what to do about something in my specialist field, so it wasn’t exactly a huge stretch for them. But at the time it felt more significant: it felt like a validation of this big risk I was taking. Someone was acknowledging that they were willing to pay for a commodity that only I could supply, despite the fact there was no big brand name on my business card to reassure them that they’d be getting a good deal. That was a huge moment for me, because I knew that if I could talk someone into that, my business had a chance.

I should really have gone out and painted the town red to celebrate, but I was so skint at that point that I had to settle for a bottle of cheap plonk and a bag of chips. Besides, although there’s something magical about that first sale, and you rightly get very excited about it, a little annoying voice in the back of your head is telling you that one sale doesn’t make a business, and if this is really going to go somewhere, you need to come straight back in the morning and do the same thing all over again. And then again, and then again, and then again until the day you quit. I reckon not many people have the appetite for this, so if you can manage to muster it, that’s half the battle won.

That said, it’s still a milestone, and I think it’s important to celebrate milestones, particularly on the sales side. So after work, I took my new sales guy Ace out for a drink to celebrate. Not that he actually did much work on this one – I’d basically lined it up for him in advance – but I need him to get a taste for entrepreneurial life (plus I wanted to share my philosophy about coming back in the morning etc). Reassuringly, he actually seemed just as excited about the fact that he’d just booked his first big meeting, after a few days of sales calls. OK, that might be because he gets full commission on that one, but hey, what do I care as long as he keeps closing deals?

‘So how are you finding it? I asked him, as I sipped my glass of red.

‘Great place to work,’ he replied instantly, in his usual too-good-to-be-true fashion. ‘But I’ve got to tell you - on the basis of these first three days, I get the feeling it’s not going to be an easy sell. There’s a lot of nervousness about.’ This, by contrast, certainly wasn’t what I wanted to hear, although I wouldn’t blame him for trying to manage my expectations a bit – I’d do the same in his shoes.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’ll get easier.’ Hopefully.