Are you planning to start your own business? No matter what size of business you plan, the initial process is not without hurdles.
Regardless of the end number of challenges and sacrifices faced by an entrepreneur of a miniscule business, it has been observed that 84% of the owners are prepared to face that again for business growth.
Clearly, starting a business on own is like taking a huge plunge. There few things you need to do before starting your own business. Firstly of course, you need an understanding of these keys to get it done.
Top 10 things one needs to do while starting as an entrepreneur
In the below section we will be discussing about some steps that an entrepreneur must follow before starting their business.
These steps are noted based on observation from the work of successful businessmen.
We also noted the success rate of entrepreneurs who didn’t apply these steps to their works.
Looks like these steps are vital when you are starting up.
1. Create a message that is powerful
When you start a business and think of promotion, what is the first thing that sells? Well, it’s the message that you send. You need a message that is powerful enough stir people’s mind and draw their attention to your brand. It is this message that successfully convinces the consumers to buy the service or product you sell.
Evidently, your message has to be powerful to do all that job.
Create a message about your company and product to make your customers clearly understand your motto. Let them know which of their problems are you addressing to, that is worth their payment. In business terms it will be like valuation of your proposition.
The message needs to be clear for you as well to give a proper understanding of your business’ success.
You can try some online marketing guide to create an appealing message too.
2. Understand your marketing with complete focus on your target consumers
You may not have a unique product. You may not be the first in the industry to provide the consumers with that particular service. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be more successful than the others. Many top notch companies earned their success by simply focusing on humble sales and excellent marketing strategies. In the modern world those strategies are mostly online based.
What business marketing strategies work the best?
The key to every successful marketing strategy is observation. Observation of the market around you will give you a better understanding of the people and their demands. The strategy works as below-
- Observe the market
- Prepare demographics to study the consumers
- Understand the customers’ demands
- Understand how they prefer to buy
- Keep track of your competitor
- Discuss certain ideas with fellow small organization
- Go through social media and online reviews of the competitors’ products
All this will help you improve your approach and product. This is likely to improve your opportunity.
3. Let the beginning be small and have a slow growth
Believe it or not, this is an important step. This will help you understand the minimum amount of cash you need in hand to run the business at a consistent pace.
You can start by self-funding your idea on business. Start your growth curve with a strong content message to attract people and slowly go ahead with funding options. This will help you to build a better story for business growth.
In the early phase of the business, you might need to break your services and products into smaller and simpler pieces. This aids to the concept of self-funding. With lapse of time you gain experience and traction and slowly start increasing your services.
Self-funding is always a better way to increase the profit margins slowly. You spend less amount on interests that otherwise would have been an expenditure if you would have taken outsourced funds.
4. Estimate and understand the available time, skills and strengths you have
As an owner of a new business, it is your duty to understand the available time slots, skills and strengths you have. You need to know them in order to ensure that you deploy department-wise manpower in a proper time. You will eventually need to engage lawyers, accountant, agent for insurance, specialist in marketing, website development and designing personnel and many more.
This is how your job as the manager as well as the owners of the business starts.
If you want to kick-start a marketing program in the online market, you will probably want to hire a professional to assist you. You can only explain your missions and products to an outsourced person for marketing when you know it yourself. Only with detailed understanding can a professional plan your marketing strategies.
5. Get advisors around yourself
Launching your business singlehandedly is difficult. But the path gets worse when try to grow the business alone. In fact, many entrepreneurs give up within the first 5 years of business.
Obviously the first 5 years are crucial. You face all your hurdles in this span, and you learn from them.
You are not expected to have knowledge on every topic or develop perspectives to cope up with every difficult situation in business. Those things come with experience. Having an experienced advisor helps here a lot.
You can discuss with them and take decision. You learn from them and increase your experience.
6. Find yourself a mentor
As mentioned in the earlier point, one can’t start operation like an experienced person from day 1 of their business. But yes, experienced advises are necessary if you don’t want any step to go wrong. You can outsource a mentor for this purpose.
Don’t know where to look for someone to guide you? Why don’t you try www.score.org? This is a website for free mentors. They will provide you with a face-to-face guidance on topics where you stuck, through Skype or similar online video calling interface.
Getting a mentor from online site has more to offer. You get to participate in webinars and workshops and checkout templates related to entrepreneurship.
Naturally, such inputs are beneficial for you when you open a new business and try to grow it big.
There are other websites too where you come across mentors and get into business discussions. Professional websites like LinkedIn might help here.
Leave the online market. If you look around, you might across wise and experienced entrepreneurs who can provide you valuable advice on business development.
7. Document your plan for the business
Starting and running a business is risky job. One invests a huge chunk of their resources and time on this in expectation of steady business. To ensure that everything goes in order, you need a steady plan.
Why don’t you start by figuring out the business type you have in mind? Will it be a proprietorship or partnership?
No matter what you decide, it’s a part of your business plan and you should write it down. It’s always essential to document your plan like, the business pattern, expected results, outcome, expenditure and so on. This will help you to be on the track.
If you keep a track of you earning, profit and expenditure, you will be able to understand whether you are doing sufficiently good. The reports and analytics will help you identify the scope of improvement to gain more.
Having plan for your business is like having a concrete layout to follow. IF you face difficulty, just modify it for better.
8. Grasp the numbers
If you want to know where you are standing at your business, you need to understand the numbers first. Knowing your numbers will help you take a proper estimate of what to expect as a return.
When we say grasp the numbers, we mean you need knowledge on these-
- Cost of start-up
- Exact sales figure
- Profit that is projected
- Inflow of cash
- Target yet to achieve
There are so much more to follow that depends on the business nature and the success you expected.
One can make several decisions in a business based on the moment. But whether it was right decision will be determined by the economics of your business. To improve the economics, one should –
- Do cost-cutting wherever possible
- Invest on cost-saving tools
- Try online marketing strategies to spread awareness
- Avoid expensive conventional advertising
9. Entitlements don’t exist in business
Your hard work is the key to your achievements. This will be the ultimate truth in business.
It’s tough to be the owner of a small company. 40% of the small company owners face difficulty with handling the cash flow, personal and business conflicts, vacations etc. But they do cope up. Only with hard work. There are never any entitlements in any new business.
10. Feel passionate towards your business
When you are an entrepreneur, you might not get enough time for your other personal desires. But you can’t let that lonely feeling grasp your dreams about your business.
The best way to deal with that is by showing passion towards your business in every step you take. Only with passion can you achieve the success you dreamt of.
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Conclusion
It’s great to give your dreams wings to fly. Its great to be an entrepreneur. But if you feel stressed while doing it alone, never panic. You can always take online advise from mentors and try the marketing tools for better results.
This is the age where digitalization rules. So, try all your marketing strategies online. Bring in tech savvy ideas and take aid from advisors whenever needed. The online guiding forums are always available for you.
Build you own success story.