Photo | AI generated.
Starting a business is not as hard as many people coin it to be, but that doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park either. If you have the courage to make the first move, the rest will follow. You don’t need to know all steps, all you need is some knowledge and the right mindset to get started.
Here are seven steps you need to get started.
Find a problem to solve
The first thing you need is to be serious with starting a business so that you can spot ideas. Business ideas are everywhere but without actively looking for one, you may never come across any, unless you spot one accidentally like this entrepreneur did. When you set your mind to find a business idea, you are likely to start reading books, business articles in magazines, websites, and even attending business seminars.
You’ve heard that finding problems to solve is the easiest route to find an idea. However, you need to know how to spot these problems and validate if it’s worth solving. There are some things that people complain about but they might not pay for a solution.
For example if you are interested in the beauty industry, ask yourself what are some of the customers’ pain points. Are the customers complaining about poor quality products or services? Are the available brands efficient in delivering the services? With these questions you can go further to ask your competitor’s clients about the quality of services they get. If they are complaining, that could be a gap you will try to fill in that industry – it could be efficiency or quality of products.
This is applicable to other industries as well. You only need to listen to your potential customer’s needs.
Test your products or services
Many entrepreneurs fail in this step. After zeroing on an idea, the next step is to test if the market really needs your product or service. Do not rush to spend a lot of money into the business without proving if your business idea is worth pursuing – in other words there is demand for that product/service or not.
Nowadays it’s very easy to test your products or services. With social media you can make a few samples of your offer and post to see if anyone shows interest in it. One of the classical ways to test your product or service is to build a wait list and then share your sample with them when ready. Their feedback will be vital in proving if the product is worth it.
You can also run a few low-budget and targeted ads to check the market response. But you have to be careful not to overspend when the idea is not yet validated in the market.
Market aggressively
When you have proven that customers need your product/service – say you have some orders and positive feedback, the next step is to fine-tune the products/services based on your customer’s feedback and start marketing aggressively. An excellent marketing campaign will enable you to reach more customers and get more feedback.
Many entrepreneurs are reluctant when it comes to marketing. Many believe that if I have a superior product or service, automatically, customers will come for it. That’s a facade. You need to do a lot of marketing to create awareness of your products/service and to generate revenue.
Having a good product is one piece of a puzzle, selling it is another and the two must work in tandem if you want to make profits. It will be worthless to have the best product/service yet no one knows about it. Selling is what makes you money.
Manage your business finances
First time entrepreneurs often fall into the trap when it comes to managing finances. Managing your cash flows is critical in every business, whether it’s a multi-billion or start-up, cash flows determine if you are heading to the right direction or you are about to close doors.
Some founders make a mistake of mixing their personal money and business money, which is totally wrong. You need to be very prudent in your business. You need to understand that your business is a different entity from you and thus you need to treat it separately. Yes, the business is yours, but drawing money from your business without proper consideration is a bad thing. Instead, evaluate the labor that you put into your business and add it as one of your expenses in the form of salary. That salary should be the only money you draw from your business until the time your business is strong enough to pay yourself dividends and even more salary.
Focus on what makes money
If you are selling multiple products or services, you should consider doubling down on the ones with high demand and spend less on the ones with less demand. Back to our beauty industry example, if hairdressing makes more money compared to selling other beauty products, you should focus more on hairdressing. This will enable you to pay enough attention to what works.
It’s better to have one superior and high demand product/service than to have multiple that bring mediocre profits or losses.
Hire an employee(s)
At this point your business is doing well, you are making decent profits and the workload is becoming too much to handle solely. This is the best time to hire employee(s) depending on the workload.
Doing everything alone could lead to burnout. Hiring is one of the toughest decisions because in most cases you believe no one can match your abilities to run the business. But as the business grows, you need more hands to get more things done. When hiring, do due diligence and pick the best employee(s). From here you will start delegating roles and getting more work done.
