Rachel Bell knows a thing or two about starting her own business. Perhaps best known in the public relations world as the founder of Shine Communications, Bell is a serial entrepreneur as well as non-executive consultant and Visitor in Entrepreneurship at London Business School. She is also a former member of the Influence editorial board.

In her latest enterprise, Bell has teamed up with ex-adman Richard Hall, a bestselling business author, consultant and mentor, to write Start-Ups, Pivots and Pop-Ups: How to Succeed by Creating Your Own Business.

In the following extract they share ten tips for starting your own business:

1 Don’t do what you can’t: She says she’s never ever sent out an invoice. Her first hiring was a bookkeeper because, ‘I didn’t understand that stuff’. But she understood the important numbers and always tracked these.

2 I was selling time not just ideas: You have only so much time to work with and you can’t sell more than 75 per cent of it or there’s nothing in reserve and your business runs out of puff.

3 Ours is a ratio game: It’s very simple. Fifty per cent of the income pays for salaries; 30 per cent pays for offices, admin and all that support overhead; 20 per cent is your profit. Live with that as your model and you won’t go wrong (Sir Martin Sorrell agrees with this model. It ruled WPP.)

4 People are the real key: Fifty per cent of the money goes on them, but they produce 100 per cent of the difference, so listen to them, hear what they are saying, all of them, because everyone matters.

5 Be attractive: Early on she pitched the Shine story to all the headhunters making sure they all knew Shine was going to be a great place to work. She was determined people would never leave with bad feeling and that everyone (suppliers, media, clients, staff) felt ‘the magic’.

6 Creating a folklore is how to make a brand: You need to find new stories the whole time. Unless your business can have the reputation where people say – “only at Shine or only at FCO’, you aren’t creating the brand illusion of being ‘the special ones’.

7 It’s all about the team… TEAM. TEAM. TEAM: When individuals become more important than the team, you have a big problem. The biggest enemy to a start-up is EGO.

8 Create relationships:  Transactions come much later. It’s who you know and how well you get on with them that, one day in the future, may allow you to make a call that saved you from a disaster or opens the door to triumph.

9 Be a ‘resource investigator’: Be curious about life. Use ‘why?’ a lot? Seek out interesting people and interesting things. Leave room in your life to discover amazement.

10 Feel good. Do good. Spread good: Idealistic? Maybe it is, but your reputation is everything, your disciples are your best salespeople and doing good things for others refreshes the soul and brightens your image.

Start-Ups, Pivots and Pop-Ups: How to Succeed by Creating Your Own Business is available from Kogan Page.