How To Build Your Business

Ingenuity Staying inspired Being a “people person” Resilience Trustworthiness Cleverness Don’t be an old dog Diligence Summary Almost everybody knows the obvious and essential activities required to build your business: Marketing, good HR, excellent SEO, superb service, etc. But what about those nebulous personality traits the top entrepreneurs all seem to have? Can one discover or emulate these traits which give one the edge in building a successful business? Reading books and articles written by top entrepreneurs, one discovers various repeating elements of what makes a great entrepreneur. We’ve listed those traits out here. Ingenuity Whether you’re devising a marketing plan to get married at a baseball stadium, or working out how to grow your email list, ingenuity is the overriding factor that top entrepreneurs have going for them. It was ingenuity that brought us such trailblazing services as Dropbox, Gmail, Facebook and others that we can scarcely live without these days. But these services were utterly unheard of before someone came up with the bright idea to create them. Ingenuity applies to everything in business, even day-to-day tasks. The more you focus on cultivating this skill in yourself, the higher chances you will have of building your business successfully and rapidly. Staying inspired Business is hard work. And the constant necessity to keep up with tax filings and red tape can put a dampener on your dreams to become a successful entrepreneur. But the rewards of building a successful business from scratch are almost immeasurable. It’s important to stay inspired, and one way to do that is to continually read up on those who made it. Even better, read up on those who made it despite seemingly insurmountable difficulties. You’ll find that your best ideas come to you when you’re feeling good and lighthearted. Few things can get you to that state of mind like the whiff of success after reading about others who’ve already succeeded. And good ideas are the very stuff of which successful businesses are made. Being a “people person” Entrepreneurship is rarely something for introverts. You need to have a lot of experience with people of all backgrounds in order to gain a sixth sense of who you can trust and who you can’t. Such a skill is imperative. It applies when forming relationships with clients, when finding new partners, and especially during the hiring process. Going with your gut has even been found to be essential in key business decisions. Resilience It’s a familiar maxim that to know success, you must’ve tasted failure. It might even be said that failure is a stepping stone on the road to success. If you really want to build your business, you have to be resilient, determined, and dogged in your efforts to make it. That doesn’t mean you must never relax. It does mean that you should be ready for a tough road and that you should face that road with fortitude. Trustworthiness Your clients must trust you because you are worthy of their trust. This ensures stable growth over the years. Facebook is now reviled as a company that repeatedly violated its users’ trust. Popular opinion on the company has plummeted over the years. Facebook grew to its mammoth size when people still believed they could trust it with their data. Being trustworthy doesn’t mean you can’t make mistakes. It means you’re honest about those mistakes and do your best to address them. Confidence in your brand is something built over time, and the more confidence it has, the larger your business will become. Maintaining a transparent blog where you openly discuss issues of trust can help build the necessary faith in your brand for it to keep growing stronger. Cleverness You don’t need to be intelligent, but you do need to be clever. You need to be on the ball constantly. You need to look at your competition and try and fathom what their next move will be. Then you need to execute your move first. When you first start your business, you’ll need to use resources in a “clever” way so that you can gain maximum return from the minimum expenditure. Don’t be an old dog Technology is growing. New ideas spring up every day. New services put old services out of business if those old services don’t adapt. The newspaper industry refused to accept that people were accessing their news digitally, and thereby adapt to the trend. This eventually led to multiple newspaper chains declaring bankruptcy. If things are changing, you need to find a way to change with them. You need to learn new tricks if you want to stay afloat in a world that changes so fast it’s hard to keep up. Diligence Nothing beats hard work. Successful people are renowned hard workers. If you have an aversion to hard work, it’s unlikely that your business will grow at all. Even if a business strikes it lucky, only hard work will keep it going through the challenges it will undoubtedly face in the coming years. None of the points on this list has any hopes of succeeding if they are not done with diligence. Summary There are plenty of books and articles delineating the obvious. Of course, you need to market your product. Of course, you need to have a website and correct branding. Of course, you need a business plan. But you could have all those things and still fail. The only way to guarantee building your business stably and successfully is to: Practice ingenuity Stay inspired Know people Be resilient Be trustworthy Be clever Change with the times, and adapt to new things Work hard, be diligent Add to that some common sense, and your business can’t help but eventually grow. About author Julia Richards Our head of content, Julia has spent the past 20 years assisting entrepreneurs with all aspects of business launch and growth strategies in various industries around the globe.

Objectives Strategies Sales Marketing Financial Forecasts How much dough are you going to make??? The Oxford Dictionary defines a Business Plan as: “A document setting out a business’s future objectives and strategies for achieving them.” The UK Government’s website adds to this by saying: “A business plan is a written document that describes your business. It covers objectives, strategies, sales, marketing and financial forecasts.” A business plan, therefore, is not only about objectives, but also how one plans to go about achieving those objectives. Far from being merely an administrative exercise required for obtaining a loan, a business plan also gets one’s “head in the right place” about proceeding with the endeavour. You need to know upfront how you plan on making your business viable long before you open the doors. Here are the general steps to creating a great business plan. Objectives To name your objective correctly, you must think of your eventual client and customer. What do they want? Do they want “the best coffee in all of London”? Do they want “high-speed, reliable internet at a fraction of the cost”? Do they want “pizzas so good they’ll make your mouth water just thinking about them”? Your objective is what your business is going to produce. Too many people lay down as an objective, “To make a lot of money”. Yes, all businesses must be profitable to keep going. But this is not an objective for your business, and won’t get any investors or bankers interested in giving you a loan for it. An objective is something that interests the client. Strategies Once you know your objective, the strategy almost writes itself. If your objective is to create the “best tasting pizza at a fraction of the cost”, then the strategy would include: Procuring the finest spices at unbeatable prices Finding an undiscovered 3-star pizza chef Investing in the most economical pizza ovens Running weekly events with free pizza slices given away so as to garner interest The key is to get your objective down nice and clearly. The strategy is then up to the limits of your imagination. Sales Bright ideas are great, but sales have more to do with the nitty-gritty than with great concepts. Marketing is one thing, and the sales section of your business plan will touch on it. But Sales is a thing in itself. To get sales, you must have a salesman. Yes, that’s obvious. Or is it? Do pizza places have a salesman? And, if they do, does the salesman attract interest by being friendly and approachable, or do they repel as a result of an overly aggressive approach? What bright ideas can you come up with to make sales? What will it cost to make sales? How much profit will each sale make, and how many sales a month must you make to get out of the red? The sales section of your business plan is both sobering and challenging. Failure to do this section well might put you into the 50 per cent of startups that don’t make it. It’s vital to get this done correctly. Marketing Good marketing should lead to increased sales. But thinking up a marketing strategy is less about the details and more about how keen your ingenuity is. It’s also easy to get carried away with marketing ideas. There are expensive ideas which are not necessarily effective at getting sales. Even if your goal is brand awareness, sales are still the only measure you have of the marketing campaign’s success. To impress investors, you need to think this through thoroughly. Instead of putting something generic like, “Get on Social Media and promote like mad!” you need to think realistically, and put down actual numbers, then back those numbers up with stats and studies. Write something like, “According to Study X, written by SEO Expert Y, Z number of social media posts a day results in a guaranteed 50 per cent increase in sales. To come up with Z number of original posts, the following people and software are needed.” Impress your investors by showing them that you have thought your marketing plan through and are not just some Johnny Come Lately with a bright idea. Financial Forecasts Finally, the big question that investors and banks want to know the answer to: How much dough are you going to make??? If you’ve taken your time on the previous steps and haven’t been unrealistic, you’ll have an answer for your financial forecast that is both accurate and achievable. There are angel investors who are wildcats, just as there are investors who only fund the sure thing. Show your potential investor that you’ve done your homework and that your startup is a sure thing that will give the investor a positive return. About author Julia Richards Our head of content, Julia has spent the past 20 years assisting entrepreneurs with all aspects of business launch and growth strategies in various industries around the globe.

Identify a need Types of business ideas 1) Business ideas that solve an existing problem 2) Business ideas that disrupt the market 3) Business ideas that bring a competitive advantage Test the business idea Trying to find a good business idea can be tough. A startup business idea might sound great in one’s own mind but really be quite terrible when put into practice. There needs to be a system to test innovative business ideas before investing too much capital in them. This article delineates some key steps to perform when testing any unique business idea. Identify a need A customer’s needs can be separated into many different categories. Some people seek better reliability in their services (e.g. a more reliable internet connection) while others are looking for lower prices and are willing to take a few cuts on quality to achieve that. Transparency is a customer-need that has become extremely popular in the last decade. FinTech companies that offer transparency (such as how TransferWise explains its fees clearly) often have an advantage over others. Potential customers might need better accessibility, such as onramps into a store for those customers who are in a wheelchair. All good business ideas need to answer these two fundamental questions to be successful: Does your business idea answer a need? Does your business plan allow for fulfilling that need? Types of business ideas There are three broad categories for a business idea. 1) Business ideas that solve an existing problem These business ideas are designed to tackle existing problems in the market. For example, let’s say you live in a remote area where package deliveries take too long to arrive. A possible business idea would be to contract with locals to get packages delivered on a “gig” basis, as Amazon has done with its Amazon Flex program. Or, perhaps deliveries can’t be made in your remote area because of bad roads. A project to build better roads might be a worthwhile business idea. 2) Business ideas that disrupt the market Uber, Airbnb, Spotify — all these businesses have one thing in common: They completely disrupted the existing business model. Netflix’s rise also played a direct role in bringing Blockbuster down. By the way, did you know that Blockbuster was once in negotiations with Netflix to be bought by the streaming giant? It might’ve saved Blockbuster’s business, but a chief player at Blockbuster stopped the deal, and then it went bust. Bad business ideas can destroy big, established businesses as much as startups! “Disruption” seems to be the mantra of every new FinTech onto the scene, disrupting traditional banking systems so as to put more power into the hands of the consumer. 3) Business ideas that bring a competitive advantage This type of business idea is simply one that “does things better”. You might want to open a pizza place in the same vicinity as an existing one. Your business idea might be based on the fact that your pizza chef was trained by the latest Pizza Chef World Champion himself! Part of offering a competitive advantage is also merely to offer improvements on an existing product or service. Maybe your new pizza place doesn’t have the World Champion Pizza Chef slaving away in the back but the pizzas are indeed tastier, more affordable, and the place is always spick and span — and the pizzas are cheaper. A business idea which offers a competitive advantage has good chances of succeeding provided all other elements of the business, like marketing and a solid business plan, are in place. Test the business idea It is crucial to test a business idea before launching into a full-scale program to bring that idea to market. There are several ways an idea can be tested, some more effective than others. The first way is to simply bounce the idea around with friends and family and get their feedback. You just need to watch out for bias on their part because they know you. Too often, friends and family don’t want to offend, which automatically flaws their opinions. In this case, you can conduct a survey of strangers — ideally, ones who are in your target market. Even better would be to discuss your idea with a professional who has extensive experience in matters of business. It isn’t only the idea itself that must be validated but also your plan on how to bring that idea to market. Is it viable to create a plan around that idea? Is it something that requires a second or third opinion? What would people have said about a service like Uber before it became the de facto standard for cheap and easy rides? Would they have supported that idea? We offer a comprehensive business idea testing service which goes above and beyond in testing your business idea. It includes discussing the idea with experienced business people and industry experts who will be able to advise you on what might be good or bad in your idea. Regardless of which option you choose — quick or thorough — you must test your idea before executing it. It is the only way to save yourself plenty of heartaches, as well as plenty of potentially lost money. About author Julia Richards Our head of content, Julia has spent the past 20 years assisting entrepreneurs with all aspects of business launch and growth strategies in various industries around the globe.