At this point, you may be wondering where to start. Should you work on your business name and logo or tackle your business structure? Does it make sense to already start applying for loans or focus on product development?
Write Your Business Plan
Having a firm grasp of your “known unknowns” is important because all it means is that you’re actively not prioritizing finding a solution right now; that’s a lot better than being unprepared or caught off guard, especially if you struggle to answer these questions while seeking funding.
Business plan outline
Next Step: For inspiration, it can be helpful to look at some business plan examples to kick things off. If you’re interested in writing a plan but turned off by lots of paperwork, we’ve developed a free business plan template that you’ll actually use.
Choose a business name
For starters, your business name is a universal facet of your marketing—it shows up everywhere you do. Keep things simple and focused: find a name that makes it clear what you do, that’s short and memorable, and that aligns with your mission and vision statement. This isn’t an effortless task, but it’s very achievable with a bit of ingenuity.
Conduct market research
What’s the potential opportunity size?
Entrepreneurs are often too dismissive of small markets. Yes, the market size should match your ambitions, but the opportunity size of a specific niche is determined by a few other dimensions. For example, if a product category has relatively few active customers, but the price of the product is relatively high and requires repurchase, that’s an attractive opportunity that founders focused on market size might miss.
Who’s your competition?
What does the competitive landscape look like for your target market? Are there many competitors, or very few? If there are a lot of competing businesses in your niche, it’s often a sign that the market is well established. That’s good for ensuring demand exists, but it will also require you to differentiate what you offer (to some degree) in order to attract customer attention and build market share.
Who is your target audience?
A target audience is a group of people you plan to sell your products and services to. Understanding your target audience makes it easier to find new customers and bring interested buyers to your website. From higher engagement on your social media channels to a greater ROI for your ads, defining your buyer personas upfront can help you succeed.
How to Start a Business
Starting a business involves planning, making financial decisions, doing market research, and acquiring knowledge in areas you never thought you would learn about before. We created this 14 step guide to starting a business to help you put your best foot forward today.
It is important to note that there is no one size fits all model to starting a new business, but these steps will help you organize your thoughts, and iron out important details so when you launch your business you have answered all the important startup questions.
Step 1. Ask Yourself if You’re Ready
There will never be a right time to start a business. If the stars couldn’t align for Romeo and Juliet, they probably won’t align for you either. But you can either look at that as the thing that holds you back from starting or use that to push you to start today.
When it comes down to deciding if you’re ready to start a business, it’s more about mindset than timing. Are you in the frame of mind right now to win? If you didn’t shout heck yeah at your computer screen, you might need to re-examine if entrepreneurship is the right path for you.
And you need to be mentally prepared to take something on. Why? Well, there are going to be challenges like creating ads that generate sales. And if your mindset isn’t in the right place, any failure could devastate you. But if you’re in the right mindset, you’ll KAPOW! failures until you finally start hitting your big wins.
Step 2. Determine What Type of Business to Start
Is there a niche that you’re particular passionate about? Are you looking for a business that you actively work on or just own? Are you looking to turn your hobby into a business? These are just a few of the questions you need to ask yourself before starting a business.
You can start everything from a Shopify store like MVMT Watches did to a freelance business. You can choose to build a business by yourself by owning a consulting business or you can build a company with a team such as a manufacturing company or a restaurant.
Next, use a tool like Keywords Everywhere to look up the search volume of your list in Google. This will help you understand how popular your list of ideas is. You can also use Google Trends to analyze whether the trend is trending upward or downward or if it’s stable to determine the niche’s long-term viability.
Then, look at the top three most popular keywords on your list and answer this question, “In five years from now, which niche would not only get me out of bed in the morning but would also excite me enough to continue creating content/products/tools for it?”
Step 3. Choose a Business Model
Step 4. Do Market Research
Step 5. Find a Problem to Solve
Step 6. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations
One of the biggest reasons for failure in business comes from naive expectations. I constantly hear stories of people pouring thousands of dollars into ads thinking they’ll triple or quadruple their money only to end up with that big, fat zero.
Most people approach their first business with a sense of false optimism. If that guy can do it, so can I, you casually think to yourself. But what you casually ignore is the fact that that guy is on his fourth business or he’s been running it for seven years.
I love, love, love how excited people are as they begin learning how to start a business. But if you go into it thinking you’re going to dominate the world on day one, you’ll be failing in a matter of months due to drastic disappointment.
The difference between a successful business and a failed one is perseverance. Do you have what it takes to keep promoting your business even when you have no customers or website visitors after a month? Are you savvy enough to know when a strategy just isn’t going to work? And are you patient enough to play the slow and steady game (meaning that you might not see sales right away but will see bigger returns down the road)?
Maybe instead of focusing on your first sale, you might focus on creating content to drive relevant traffic. Or maybe before you start a business, you choose to build a following on Instagram so that you have an audience when the time to launch comes.
Prepare for growth
The best thing you can do to take advantage of any mistakes is set up review processes to help you make decisions. This is where the Lean Plan, or full business plan, you’ve been working on comes into play.
If you have your plan up to date, you can set up monthly review meetings to go over the numbers, your strategy and develop forecasts for the next month, quarter, and year. This is a simple way to keep track of performance and actively make decisions based on actual results. So, rather than reacting to bad situations, you are preparing for them and facing uncertainty with certainty.
To help you start your review process, you can download our free cash flow statement and balance sheet examples to begin tracking your financials. And for a simpler solution, that makes reviewing forecasts and financial statements faster and simpler, you may want to consider LivePlan.
With LivePlan, you can create your Lean Plan, full business plan, pitch, and develop forecasts all within one platform. But, if you’re not quite ready to invest in a planning platform, the templates within this guide will be enough to help you get your business up and running.
Candice Landau
Authorship:
https://www.shopify.com/blog/how-to-start-a-business
https://www.oberlo.com/blog/how-to-start-a-business
https://articles.bplans.com/business-ideas/7-steps-to-starting-your-own-business/#:~:text=How%20to%20start%20a%20business%201%20Determine%20if,Make%20your%20business%20legal.%20…%20More%20items…