Steps to Start Your Own Business

Steps to Start Your Own Business

Business – serious business, is not for the faint of heart. Even while passion is pumping through your entrepreneurial veins, you need to proceed with caution.

Starting a business is not unlike running the Comrades Ultra Marathon. You don’t just wake up one morning and decide to run it.

You most likely would have first assessed the situation, decided that the indicators are good, and then started a training programme to get you towards the starting line.

Evaluate

The excitement at the thought of being your own boss or leaving a dead-end job behind can lead to fast-tracking the “I quit!” letter prematurely. Stop and think about feasibility:

Identify what your niche is – and what your solution will look like. As cliched as it sounds, relate this to what you’re passionate about, because when times get tough, it’s passion that will pull you through.

Do your homework – Research, research, research. Study your competitors, your target market, and your product intently. Leave no room for error.

Profitability – Think about your business model, what does the profit margin look like? Does it have the potential for higher margins as it grows?

Skills – What is the main skillset that will generate your income in your chosen niche, can it bring in decent revenue, and are you expert enough to compete on the playing field?

Character traits – discipline, dedication, creativity, curiosity, resilience, confidence, self-reliance, humility, focus, open-mindedness. Out of these ten traits, how many are part of your strengths?

Activate

Once you’ve passed the feasibility test in the evaluation stage, and you’re determined to go ahead, you need to start building or fast-track your entrepreneurial activities:

Develop your personal brand – the moment the entrepreneurial seed was planted, you would have begun building your profiles on a variety of platforms. Whether it’s your website, LinkedIn profile, or YouTube channel, establishing your personal brand beforehand puts you a few steps ahead. But you need to think like a marketer and fine-tune it for serious business.

Upskill – During your ‘limbo’ period, tune in to the activities that will provide you with the skills you identified as lacking or need brushing up on. Read business books, take an online course, watch videos – anything you do that takes you closer to your business goal is worth the time and effort. This growth mindset may be one of the most important traits towards your business success and development.

Network – Develop a professional network of like-minded people. Surround yourself with experts and thought leaders in your field.  Besides benefiting from the knowledge and experience of a diverse group of people, it opens you up to new opportunities.

Find a mentor – Support, intellectual or moral, is one of the most important elements for a start-up to have. A mentor can help you stay focused when your motivation wanes. A good mentor brings invaluable experience for fledgeling start-ups because they’ve learnt pattern recognition and can help steer you in the right direction.

Execute

Evaluating and executing is like the assessment and training phase before you run the marathon.

It chews up days, weeks, and months, but stick with it  the mental and physical strength you gain pays off in the long run!

When the time comes to hand in that letter of resignation, you’ll be confident you’re doing the right thing.

Build a team – No matter how smart you are, trying to do absolutely everything yourself is exhausting and counter-productive. Your team can be as small as two people, (including yourself) but choose very carefully. Many businesses have seen its demise because of a wrong team member.

Start a side hustle – you will have to forego the Friday afternoon office drinks and Sunday braais, you might even have to divorce your friends and family, at least for a while. Many successful companies started as side hustles, think: Apple, Instagram, Under Armour.

Three key tips to remember

Focus on the Why – “People don’t buy What you do, they buy Why you do it.” Every business owner and marketer would be familiar with Simon Sinek by now.

Work hard, work smart – Yes, working hard matters, unless you’re going to be satisfied with mediocrity – but do it with maximum efficiency. Figure out what the process and tools are to work smarter.

Plan B – While having a backup plan is essential and the sensible thing to do, try to stay focused on your primary plan. If you do have to implement Plan B, know that this does not mean failure. In fact, this is how Twitter was founded.

Getting to the finish line makes every minute of your hard work worth it.

After you’ve hung up your medal and start to walk normally again, evaluate your performance to see how you can improve for next year’s run. True entrepreneurs never stop reaching.

One of the biggest failures of start-ups is insufficient working capital. You need to be able to survive for up to six months without any revenue.

With millions of jobs lost in Africa formal sector, your small business idea can help make a positive contribution to the country and to your sense of entrepreneurial spirit.