Starting your own business, particularly in challenging times, can be stressful and difficult. Trying to help first-time business owners, I have prepared these 20 start-up tips that cover step-by-step some of the most important aspects of your new business.
1. Do what you love
Considering you will be dedicating a lot of time and effort not only to set up your new business, but also to conduct your business once opened, it is important for you to choose something you love doing. It is hard to succeed and excel at something you don’t really like, isn’t it? So, make sure your business idea is related to something you really love and want to spend time on doing.
2. Reduce your working time and increase productivity
In order to juggle between your role as a parent, spouse, friend, housekeeper, cook, driver, and everything in-between, you need to prioritise and manage your time. Start by reducing your workload, removing unnecessary work, and focusing on what matters. To better manage your time, plan ahead, prioritise your activities, set realistic deadlines, and use the time of the day when you are the most productive to work on important things. Finally, don’t be a perfectionist; very good is already good enough!
3. Improve your organisational skills
Organisational skills are very important to help you manage your time, being with your family, at work, or during your other activities and responsibilities. By improving your organisational skills, you will be able to use your time more efficiently, spend more quality time with your family, and set-up and start promoting your online business faster. Try using to do lists, use a planner (calendar), take notes, organise your workplace and your documents, use labels, organise your computer and make regular backups.
Some of these tips might take you some time at first. But on the long run, they will save you time and help you not miss any important action or deadline. Find out in more details how you can improve your organisational skills here.
4. Define your why
Before deciding what you are going to do as an entrepreneur, you need to understand why you do it. The “Why” represents your fundamental reason, for which you decided to do your business and it serves as a constant throughout the process that will guide you toward achieving your goals.
5. Define your business idea
Before setting up your business, you need to define your business idea. This will serve as a compass for all your other planning and execution activities related to setting up, promoting and growing your online business. Make sure your business idea is related to something you love doing and are good at, but that you can also sell online, because it can help solving problems for your customers.
If you need more help with your business idea and concept definition, the IB4SME Business Concept Definition Guide can be of great help.
6. Choose your market
When defining your target market, you need to answer the question: “Where are you going to sell your products or services?” Where you promote and sell your solutions are strongly connected with whom you are selling them to. Also, depending on the type of product or service you offer, you might be able to sell only to your local area, or you might go international.
7. Define your target customers
Without customers your business would not generate any income. Customers are therefore essential for your sales. But not everyone can be your customer, and as a small business owner, you cannot serve too many customers. Thus, you need to properly define your target customers and their needs. By providing solutions to your customers’ needs, you lay out the basis for a successful business.
8. Know your competition
There are three main reasons why knowing your competitors is important if you want to start your own business. First, it can help you stand out from your competition. Second, you can learn best practices from them. And last, this can help you create competitive advantages. All this will then help you minimise risk and increase your chances of success.
If you have never done a competition analysis before, in the Blog article “Why Knowing Your Competitors is Important?” you will learn how to search, identify and analyse your competition in a simple and fast way.
9. Define your competitive advantage
You have probably already heard about ‘competitive advantage’, but you might not know exactly what it means. Simply put, a competitive advantage is something that you have, which your direct competitors don’t. This can be related to pricing, a specific product or service, faster delivery times, original solutions, and so on. Studying your competitors can help you define your own business and solutions competitive advantages.
10. Prepare a business plan
Once you have a basic idea of what you are going to do, as well as where and whom are you going to sell to, you need to define who will be your partners and suppliers, and also define how you are going to actually work. Simply put, you need to define your business model and prepare your business plan.
In your business plan you will cover the following aspects of your business: your target market, customers, competition, business model, products and services, competitive advantage, branding, business platform, marketing strategy and a financial plan.
If you have never prepared a business plan before, the IB4SME Business Plan Template can help you and make it faster and easier for you to prepare your first business plan properly.
11. Create your brand
Having a strong brand is very important to help you be found and recognised, and thus, it needs to be done professionally to express what your business is about and to be right for your target customers. As such, it is important for you to leave this to a professional.
However, you need to work with your marketing/branding agency in order to create the right brand for you. The IB4SME 10 Characteristics of a Great Logo Checklist and the IB4SME Brand Identity Manual Content Checklist can help you with that.
12. Choose your business platform
To conduct online business, you need an online presence. Depending on the type of business, your main business activity, products and services, you have various platform choices. You can have your own company website or just a small landing page with your solution. You might need your own e-commerce, or you can sell your products and services on existing e-commerce portals, such as Amazon, for example. As a start, you can also operate from a business page on one of the existing social media platforms until you have enough funds for your own website.
13. Prepare your solution
Having just one or more products and services might not be enough to achieve good sales. What you need is one or more solutions. A solution is a set or bundle of related or complementary products and/or services that you are selling to your customers. But why having a solution is important? The answer is simple. People are more likely to buy your solution when they feel they are getting more than they pay for. Basically, their perceived value of what you are offering needs to be higher than the price they need to pay.
If this is the first time you are preparing a solution, the IB4SME Solution Preparation Guide can be of great help, guiding you step by step through the key elements of a successful solution preparation.
14. Prepare your marketing strategy
Every business needs to make sales in order to survive. In order to sell, you need to promote your business in some way. Here is where marketing comes into play. Having a marketing strategy is important because it helps you promote your business by defining how you communicate your solutions to potential customers and through which channels.
You can find out more about this in the blog article “7 Steps to Prepare a Marketing Strategy for Your Start-Up”.
15. Learn digital marketing
No one expects from you to suddenly learn everything there is to know about digital marketing. However, you need to have some knowledge about it if you want to promote and sell your solutions online. You can start by learning some key marketing terms. After that, you can find numerous courses, guides and tutorials online where you can learn what you need to promote your solutions.
If you have some budget for it, it is a good idea to have a professional marketing agency help you with your digital marketing activities, at least in the beginning.
16. Promote your solution online
Once you have prepared your marketing strategy, you need to put into practice what you planned: promote your solution online. Without promoting your business and solution online, the marketing strategy would remain just a plan.
If you do not have any experience in digital marketing and online promotion, our Digital Marketing Toolkit can be of great help.
17. Choose professionals for support
If you are starting your own business or you already are a small business owner, no matter how capable, smart, knowledgeable, or experienced you are, you can’t do everything on your own and get the results you want. Therefore, in order to succeed, you need to seek professional help for the things you can’t do on your own, be it accounting, branding, content writing, web design and development, printing, or other activities.
Once you decide in which areas you require help, employ people or find suppliers that can provide you with what you need.
18. Comply with GDPR and other legal requirements
No matter how small your business is, if you are going to sell to and communicate with customers based in the European Union, you need to comply with GDPR, among other legal requirements. The GDPR specifies a number of data protection principles, which drive compliance. These can be summarised into seven key principles related to the lawful processing of personal data.
Find out more about the GDPR in the blog article “GDPR Basics for Small Businesses”.
19. Start small and then grow your business
If you are starting your first business, it would be better for your to start small. Start with one key activity, with one or a few solutions, in one or a few markets. Once you test the waters, see what works and what doesn’t, and have a good revenue (achieving your business goals), you can grow, scale and automate your business.
20. Learn from others
Throughout all the stages and aspects of your new start-up, it’s always a good idea to learn from others. You can ask experts in the field for advice, participate at relevant webinars and workshops, learn through online courses and tutorials, and talk to other professionals, friends and family. Try to learn what you can be useful for the planning and operations of your business, keeping in mind that you can also learn from someone else’s mistakes.
Summary
The main purpose of all the tips shared in this article is to bring your attention to relevant aspects and actions related to your new business start-up. To summarise, these are the 20 start-up tips for first-time entrepreneurs:
- Do what you love
- Reduce your working time and increase productivity
- Improve your organisational skills
Define your why- Define your business idea
- Choose your market
- Define your target customers
- Know your competition
- Define your competitive advantage
- Prepare a business plan
- Create your brand
- Choose your business platform
- Prepare your solution
- Prepare your marketing strategy
- Learn digital marketing
- Promote your solution online
- Choose professionals for support
- Comply with GDPR and other legal requirements
- Start small and then grow your business
- Learn from others.
These tips represent just a start. You need to learn, understand and consider all these and other things in more details in order to increase your chances of success. To help you throughout this process, we provide various resources, webinars, blog articles, videos, courses and more. Sign up now to access our free material and keep up to date with our latest material and events.
