The Complete 12 Step Guide for starting a Business or starting a startup
We bring you the complete 12 step guide for starting a business or starting a startup in detail. By using this step by step guide you can get into the world of entrepreneurship and be your own boss. Start your own business and be your own boss is a bit of somewhat wrong advice in some manner. Look at the article of Worst advice given for entrepreneurs.
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In order to succeed, Your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure
Being an entrepreneur requires quite a different talent and requires hard work and dedication to reach dreams. When are you called an entrepreneur? You are an entrepreneur when you start your own business or startup and be your own boss. Starting a startup requires quite a lot of things and everything needs to be done perfectly.
When we were in our early days, we wanted to start our own business. But we have no idea where to start. We just wanted to launch the company and go on. But we know that it doesn’t work. You have to go through some of the steps. But we faced a lot of difficulties to finally start our own business.
Starting a business involves a long procedure and to begin you have to start somewhere with the basic idea of what you are building. And in order to comply with the local and central laws, you have to first follow and complete that procedure before actually starting your business.
So, where do you have to start actually? Is it that confusing? Yes of course it is. But don’t worry. we bring you the complete step by step guide to help you. We have in detail explained each and every step that should be done to start a business.
Starting a startup or to be exact your own business is your dream and you have to get it properly. Doing at least a single wrong will completely ruin your business. Not just business but your life as you will invest all your funds and those all will be gone in vain.
Believe me, After reading this article you will have an idea about starting a startup
So you wanted to be an entrepreneur and start your own business. But know these risks each entrepreneur faces and no one will actually speak of. And then here are the main steps that are involved in starting your business.
Note: Don’t just think as easy by looking at the list. There is a lot involved in each step. Go in detail to find the problems in every step.
Steps for starting the startup/business
- Evaluate Yourself – your strengths
- Identify a business idea
- Market Research
- Feedback
- Make it Official
- Create a business plan
- Finance your business
- Develop your product or service
- Team
- Location
- Sales
- Growth
You can also refer to the following books. We have gone through a list of books and found these as the best.
- The Purpose Is Profit: The Truth about Starting and Building Your Own Business
- Small Business Survival Guide: Starting, Protecting, And Securing Your Business for Long-Term Success
- Make it in India – Handbook on Starting and Doing Business
Evaluate Yourself
First thing is to examine yourself. This will help you to decide whether you should proceed to start your new business or not.
Ask yourself, why do you want to start your own business. Is it for money? Then try some more methods that earn very good money. Is it for freedom, Then leave your 9-5 job and look another one? I think you are getting an idea of what am clearly wanted to tell. I just wanted to highlight the importance of entrepreneurship, that is not just a money earning field but something more.
If you have examined clearly ask yourself ask your self these below question. Keep in mind that you have to be exceptionally true and speak out from your heart as this determines your future.
- What are you exceptionally good at?
- What is your most interest
- What is your main motive
- What do you dream to achieve
- How much time can you spend
- Do you even know the risks of being an entrepreneur
If you have answered those questions and still believe that you are ready to start a business then proceed to the next step.
Identify a Business Idea
As to be an entrepreneur you should probably have your own idea. If you have an idea then you are one step ahead. you can proceed with your idea.
Make your passion your paycheck
Selecting an idea involves many factors. You need to be careful when selecting the idea. Because this is the idea on which your entire and your life depends.
Consider the following points while identifying startup ideas.
What the next trend in technology: Ask yourself what trend will be the next that will come in technology. Having the complete idea of which will be trending is most important. You must consider this as identifying the proper trend will make you take the chance and start your trend.
Find the bugs and try to solve them: The Most important thing that needs to be considered when starting your business is to find the problem that bugs people and try to solve that issue. People will always love your idea and encourage if you are eliminating the bug in their life and make their life even more comfortable. So try to find the bugs. This requires a wide range of market research and proper identification of problems. So start your research and find the bugs and identify that bothers most of the people.
Start your journey in a new field: You might be thinking to start a business in a field that is already performing well. but don’t enter into the same field and copy the same business. This will not work and will not be a wise thing to do. As you are keeping your hard work and your time and your investment, start in a new field and began a new journey and get the success and create a new industry.
Use a better cheaper and Faster approach: What do we mean by this. We mean just one thing you have to be fast in your approach. Life is too short. We believe that and you have to achieve everything in your life and even enjoy the success. So get the idea that has the potential to reach great heights in a cheap and fast manner.
Understood properly? Give a thought folks. These matter a lot in selecting the idea. They may be just a simple thing to consider and they play an important role. Happy selecting your idea and select the idea for the next big industry and be your own boss.
Market Research
Do you have any idea what market research is actually? Market research is the primary thing to be done after deciding the project idea. This research gives the idea of whether we should proceed forward and how to actually proceed and how feasible the idea is.
You have to identify the following things in the market research
- Is there anyone who already started your idea
- Is the idea have enough resources to build and manage
- Complete market analysis for the project idea ie, how many people will think your idea is useful
- Is the idea has the potential to get profits and will the business sustain for a long time.
If you have identified the above things you will get the idea of how much your idea is worth and how you need to proceed.
There are many tools that are available online that also can be used as another resource to conduct market research. Many people do many mistakes in doing market research. Please don’t commit these mistakes as these give the wrong analysis and results.below are the mistakes performed by many
- Using only the online resources
- getting data only from friends
- Surveying only people you know
These factors give the wrong results and will misguide you. So take care while doing the market research and analyze properly. Get suggestions from experienced people that will surely help you.
Feedback
You might feel everything right from your perspective but there always some errors or bugs. It’s is always the best-practiced way to get feedback from the users and customers. You will have to encourage them to give feedback and improve from the feedback to see the growth in your business.
You will find a lot of mistakes that you are unable to find from the feedback. You will have to act according to the feedback you received from the people and users of your product.
People will give negative feedback, but don’t worry. Just say thank you for the feedback and try to solve those errors. This kind of behavior makes people be loyal and good satisfaction feeling and will make them improve the rating the next time.
Whenever you hear multiple reasons from many users and you have to immediately start working on the problem and eliminate at the earliest possible. And gradually eliminating the problems from the feedback given by users will make your product get the attention and will perform better in the market.
People will always encourage the product that is always developing eliminating the problems. you always try to create a relation of love between people and your product and you will see returning customers to your business. In the beginning, you may not see the rapid growth but at the far end, you will go high if you make this habit of getting feedback and eliminating errors.
Make it Official
You have to always follow all the legal procedures that exist in your area and always comply with the laws. In order to save your business from stealing you have to make it official. Register your business officially and get all the documents clear and make all the laws clear regarding your business.
You will never enjoy facing legal notices in the middle after some growth in the business. This will make you lose the trust of customers and will be a boon to the growing company. So always be first to fill all the legal documents
The following must be taken care of in case of a new business
- Business Structure
- Business name
- Register your business
- Central Tax ID
- State Tax ID
- permits
- License
- Bank accounts necessary for business
- Trademarks, copyrights, and patents
While these are all procedures that need to be done. You can do some of them on your own and you have to hire a lawyer to do some of the things. You can also find some online services that will help you in completing all the above things and proceed in a smooth manner.
Create a Business Plan
A business plan is most important for the operation and the flow of the business. A detailed and written business plan will make the business more smoothly without any troubles.
A business plan is a description of how your business works and this determines how different operations in business occurs. Every successful business is started by a proper business plan. A Properly made business plan makes the operations of the business run smoothly and efficiently.
For starting a business plan, the following things should be included in a business plan.
- Title page :
This consists of your business name. This makes it easy for you to differentiate the business plans of different businesses and also make it easy for all others who look at your plan. Always start with the name of your business. - Executive Summary:
This section should involve the basic Summary of your business. Include a basic summary of the problems your business is solving and your plans for the future of the business and your main moto. - Business Summary:
A complete description of your business. The complete plans for the future and also the strategies of your business. - Marketing Strategies:
Marketing plays an important role in any business. Without proper marketing, no business can proceed further in their journey. So it is very important that you should have a proper plan on how you are planning your marketing. - Analysis of competition:
Every Competition involves competition and you should consider the competition you have by analyzing how they are operating. You should carefully examine what are your competitive defects and how you can properly use those and avoid in your business. - Design and Development :
This section should include what your business is basically and how you are planning your budget and usage of funds in your business. - Operations and management plan:
These sections involve details about the daily functioning details of your business. - Finance Factors:
This section involves the details about financing your business. How you plan in the future to get finance for your business and what are your plans in case of emergency finance and also finance for sustaining your business.
Finance Your Business
Getting finance for your business is most important as this keeps your business sustaining. There are many ways by which you can get your business financed. The following are the best ways we have identified by which you can get finance for your business.
Fund your self
Try getting funds from your own money. your personal money, your savings and everything you have saved. This makes you are o take the complete risk of your business and you are the sole owner of your business.
Ask Friends and family
You can take help from your family friends and others who are very close to you. Ask them, tell them about your business and get financial help and tell them you will return as soon as you see your business getting sales.
Request a small business loan
You can head over to the banks and ask them to finance your business. If your business idea is liked by the officials they will fund your business. As these days banks are showing keen interest to invest in startups and business if your business idea is worthy enough you will get funding from the banks.
Apply for crowdfunding:
List your website in crowdfunding sites and those will help you in making your website reach investors who are interested in investing startups and business. And if your business is liked by a few of the investors you will get calls.
If you are very sure of your business idea and you are actively looking for some of the big investors you can apply for angel investors and get investment for your business.
Other methods are
- use your credit card(risky)
- join startup incubator or accelerator
- Negotiate an advance payment from a partner
Develop your product of service
Now you have gathered all the necessary things that are required for your business now its time that you start bringing your product or service to life.
After all the steps you have done to start your business you have to be very cautious that you have enough resources to get into the work of bringing the product to life. For example, you are developing a website, you should have few experienced and well know web developers and if you are producing a product you need to get in touch with some of the manufacturing companies to mass-produce.
While producing the product you have to take care that it should meet those standards and will be as you are planned. Because after launching the product if it failed at least a few things then all your work for a long time will be gone in a vain. So it’s your responsibility to take care to control the quality of the product
During the product development time, you have to be very sure that nothing goes wrong. and if you have a team who is always checking if everything is going as planned. And Time management is an important thing that matters when you are running out of the deadline.
People will always love your brand if you are releasing everything in time and never cross the deadline. So time management is the most important one to take care of.
Developing your product always remove the errors in the next version and constantly take care to improve your product. It’s very important. people will never encourage you a very long time if you are showing nothing new in your product so keep on learning from the feedback from the customer and changing from time to time. This keeps on sustaining the growth of your business.
Team
Now you are producing your product and you need a long team in a different department to look at different tasks. the business is your dream and you have to take care of you hire a proper team to look over your dream company. There are a few things we need to suggest in hiring the team
- Never compromise by your relationship
This the biggest problem that arises if you are starting your company. You have friends and family who have no talent asking for big positions, this may ruin. Consider giving positions they are suitable and be frank. - Make your requirements clear
make your requirements clear when you are posting a job requirement. If you need a web developer make it clear the technologies they are supposed to work. This gives the applicants a good idea and you get the best applications - Select the best one
you will get many applications and select the best one you can get - Consider personal behaviour
Consider the persons who stay in the company for a long time. If a person is changing many companies in the very short time it’s not suggested to select that person. Give also some importance to the behaviour of the person in addition to their talents because that is very important to maintain a nice environment in the company - Design the company culture
Your company should have a unique culture that encourages employees and that should be such that it creates a nice expression for the customers. Try to make the work more productive.
Location
Your location where the business located plays an important role in the growth and also the sustainability of the business. This also determines how customers react to your product.
While selecting your business locations consider the following factors
- Style of operations
- Demographics
- Availability of required resource
- FootAccessibility
- Accessibility and parking
- Competition
- Proximity to other business and services
- Ordinances
- House rent and utility cost
- Market availability
- Transport availability
Sales
Now getting some sales to your business to give a boost is most important. These initial sales are most important to know whether our product is liked in the market and to get some feedback on the product and also get some funds for the business.
These sales you need to get by proper marketing and reaching out to potential customers. You need proper initial marketing as this is the first time your product has reached the market and you need to gain some trust from the people to get them to use your product.
Don’t get depressed even if you don’t get some sales and keep on trying. It is very important that you never lose your hope. if you have proper market analysis then you will have a complete idea of what time of people will love your product or service and you need to consider focusing on that range of people and try getting the sales.
Try getting sales and get proper feedback and always get good customer satisfaction. it is proven that with good customer satisfaction you will get returning customers and growth of the business.
Growth
You have an established business and you need to keep that. With improper management and not caring department, your business will move to termination soon.
People will never continue to use the same product or service. they always look for new things and also try to get the best they can. So you have to make sure you meet their requirements.
One thing that you need to keep in mind that you need to always look to include something new in your business. You always need to look into the needs of the public. As we have already introduced the importance of the feedback, you need to get the feedback and try to improve from that.
learning from the feedback of the customers you need to show constant growth of the business. Always need to show constant growth and never restrict yourself to a single thing.
An industry that is involving in new things will always be encouraged by society So be an active entrepreneur rather than just a normal head of a business. Come out into society and involve your self in the happening around and get attention from the public. Be active and be Growing.
Have a nice journey toward your dream
All the best
The below are the top books which give you a complete idea on how to start a startup