You think your business will be a success because your idea is good. But you don’t know how to get started. Here are 10 tips that will help you to work your idea:
- Be willing to explore: Use what you know about the business idea to find what you don’t know. Learn from case studies of various startups for effective preparedness.
- Know yourself: Determine your core values, your motivational level and ability to take risks. To be successful, keep your business plans in line with your personal and family goals and resources.
- Be ready with your business plan: A business plan will help you gain clarity, focus and confidence. A plan does not need to be more than one page. As you write down your goals, strategies and action steps, your business becomes real.
- Be sure your idea will sell: Talk to real potential prospects (who aren’t family and friends) to find out if what you want to sell is something they’d be interested in buying, and if so, what they’d pay for the product or service. To be successful, you need to research the competition and find out as much as possible about what they sell and how they sell it.
- Plan your finances: Put together a spreadsheet that estimates the one-time startup costs for your business (licenses and permits, equipment, legal fees, insurance, branding, etc.), as well as what you anticipate you will need to keep your business running for at least 12 months.
- Choose your business structure: Your small business can be a sole proprietorship, a partnership, a limited liability company (LLC) or a corporation. The business entity you choose will impact many factors from your business name, to your liability, to how you file your taxes.
- Register your business: Once you’ve picked the perfect business name, it’s time to make it legal and protect your brand.
- Start building your team: To run your business, you are going to need to hand off responsibilities to other people. You need a team; it may even be one person or more depending upon the initial amount of work.
- Set Up Your Business Location: Setting up your place of business is important for the operation of your business, whether you will have an office at home, a shared or private office space, or a retail location.
- Brand your business and advertise: As a small business, you can start small but branding is important for your growth.