Starting a new business can be as daunting as leaping off a five storey building. In the former, failure can leave you financially broke, while the latter could leave you physically broken if you didn’t lay out effective pre-emptive plans for your landing.
Every financial investment is a risk, and that’s why you have to adopt working strategies if you truly want your new business to thrive. Therefore, if you are looking to start a new business, here are five crucial steps you can follow to ensure its success:
- Evaluate Yourself and Create a Business Plan
This is where you ask yourself some very important questions.
- What motivated you to start a business?
- What type of business do you want to start?
- What’s your goal and objectives for this business?
- What are the milestones for your new business?
- Is there a market for that business?
- Who will buy your product and how do you plan on reaching them?
- How much competition will you have to contend with?
- Do you have the skills to pull this venture off?
- What’s your budget for this business?
- How do you finance your business?
- From where do you source your product?
- What are your marketing and adverting plans?
These are some of the questions whose answers will guide you through creating your business plan and analysing your market.
- Make Your Business Legal
Basically, your business doesn’t exist until you make it legal. However, take some time to acquaint yourself with the advantages and disadvantages of various business formations. Using an attorney at this stage can make the process easier and simpler.
This is where you choose a name for your business, register your business structure, file the necessary paperwork and pay the necessary fees, publish a notice of intent, procure your licenses and permits, apply for tax exempt, and so on.
Learn more about registering your business here.
- Set Up a Business Website
In this internet age, where consumers are moving online to research companies, products, and services before making purchases, it is paramount that any company that wants sustained success has to set up a website detailing out everything concerning its business. The website can also serve as a means of pulling in new customers and retaining old ones. It exposes your business to a global market.
How do you start?
You first need to register a domain name, preferably one that is unique and relevant to your business. Make the name one consumers can easily remember. If it’s a [dot]com domain name, then splendid. Once, you have got your domain name, the next thing to do is take out a webhosting service. There are many providers out there—Freeparking.co.nz, for instance. The best part is that you can actually purchase a hosting service from the registrar with whom you indexed your domain.
Next, you need to hire a web designer, after which you launch your website and feed it with content about your company and product/service.
Here is a full guide for setting up a company website.
- Set Up Your Shop
This depends on whether you want to run a physical shop or an online one. Whichever it is, you need to have ample inventory stocked before orders start trickling in. For a physical store, you will need to rent a space, furnish it, and possibly even hire employees. You will also need to consider price, competition, the visibility of the shop you want to lease and how accessible it is, the distribution of competitors in the area, and more.
While you may not require a physical shop for an online business, you may need a warehouse to store your product and arrange with a shipping company for the delivery of the goods to consumers—unless what you are offering is a service. You may even need employees.
Read more on setting up shop online here.
- Learn from Mistakes
No-one starts out perfect. In fact, there is nothing like perfection in business. Instead, it’s an education. Hence, you will make mistakes along the way. But what will ultimately decide how successful your business gets is your ability to learn from mistakes and adapt, your creativity, your open-mindedness…
Constantly study the market. Study your customers and consumers in general. Your understanding of them will help you tailor out better products or services and thus achieve the success you want for your business.
Lastly, always leave room for growth. If after five to ten years you are still where you are today, then you are doing something wrong. A stagnant business is as much a failure as a dead one. Growth is the definition of success in business. So strive for it.