Two of the key focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. They say that the majority of business fail with the first couple of years, but even to give your idea a chance to succeed you have to start it. There are some key considerations to getting it up and moving. The following contributed post is thus entitled, Getting Your First Small Business UP and Running.
* * *
Nowadays, increasing numbers of people are opting to set up their own small business in an attempt to escape the rat race and work towards building their own dreams rather than making someone else’s dreams a reality. But setting up a business can actually prove to be a relatively complex process. So, it’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with the start up process before throwing yourself in the deep end! Here are just a few areas you should focus on to get the ball rolling in the right direction.
Company Formation
One of the first steps that you need to take when it comes to setting up your company is to engage with company formation. If you are unfamiliar with the process of starting a company www.yourcompanyformations.co.uk will be able to help you out. This process will essentially establish your business as a distinct legal entity, making everything official!
Product and Service Development
Now that the ball is rolling, it’s time to start seriously considering what kind of products or services you are intending to provide the consumer market with. If you already have an idea, that’s great. But if you’re feeling lost and are unsure what area you’d like to specialise in, choose something that you are genuinely interested in and try to identify a gap in the market within this field. The marketplace is already a very saturated place, so it could prove extremely difficult to offer a product or service that already exists – someone else will have already established their company as a leading brand or force and chances are that they have more money to play with when it comes to advertising and securing brand loyalty. Identifying a gap means you have a good opportunity to dominate an area of the marketplace for yourself.
Conduct Market Research
No matter how good you might think your idea is and how much encouragement you might have from friends and family members, it’s absolutely essential that you conduct market research. Market research is essentially a process where you pitch your products to your target demographic and see what they think of them. You can gain a whole lot of information, including:
● Whether your product concept appeals to people.
● What they feel could be improved about your product.
● Whether they already source a similar product from someone else and who these alternative products are being provided by.
Engaging with this process will give you unbiased information and advice from the exact people you are targeting. These are the people that your company relies on for sales and profit, so who could possibly be better to ask? At the end of the day, no matter how much time, effort, and money you pump into your business, everything will be wasted if people don’t want to buy what you have to offer them. Once you’ve got the go ahead with your product concept, you can also use market research to determine whether your products will be financially viable and potentially profitable. You can ask target consumers questions about:
● Their income (this will help you to figure out an average so you know how much the average consumer you are targeting earns and has disposable).
● How much they would be willing to pay for the product that you are offering.
This will help you to come up with realistic price points and you can then work out profit margins. If there’s a large margin, it could be worth going ahead. If you’d be making a minimal amount of profit after forking out for manufacturing, packaging, shipping, and other factors, you might want to give creating this product a miss. As you can see, conducting market research before going any further ahead will help you to only make wise investments and only move forward with bringing concepts to life that will actually sell. If you are unfamiliar with conducting market research yourself, not to worry. There are plenty of different tutorials out there that can help you find participants and ask the right questions. However, generally speaking, it’s best to outsource this service. This ensure your market research is conducted with as little bias as possible (as it will be carried out by a third party) and you can better spend your time focusing on other areas of your business’ progression while market research is being carried out.
These, of course, are just the starting blocks of starting your own successful business. But everyone has to start somewhere and focusing on these areas should get things off to a good start!
