Credit: Danielle MacInnes
Now is a great time to start a business. You're saying, "Hold up Trevor, we are all on lock down, are you kidding?" No joke - right now is a great time to start a business with a caveaut:
Design a company that is agile, not dependent on physical location, with a strong online presence.
Businesses succeed when they solve a problem. Right now, consumers have a whole set of new problems that your business can solve.
Whether you're launching a new clothing line for sweat pants and lounge gear or at-home fitness training, there are opportunities to grow and succeed in the new marketplace.
Create a Business Plan
Starting a new business is exciting, nerve wracking and you gotta think on your feet a lot. But, if you have a business plan mapped out ahead of time it gives you a great jump off point.
You may not even follow the plan. Or you may pick and choose parts to follow and adapt other parts as you go along - being agile is critical to your success. Pivoting as you see fit allows you to succeed.
Don't kill yourself writing it. Make it 5-7 pages max. Get your ideas out of your brain in a format for a business template.
Cover these Important Business Points
Write down your answers to these questions in one document:
How are you going to grow?
What are you trying to build?
How are you different from competitors?
How do you make customers wildly happy?
Ponder the chapters of your business
Think about the segments of growth for the chapters of your business. For instance, if you're starting a vegan delivery food truck that customers can order from via an app - 1st you'll have the food truck and app developed.
Then your vegan food delivery service can expand to a full restaurant. After that it'll become a catering business for a larger area. Perhaps this will then open up to franchising or being priced to sell.
The concept here is that when you're thinking on your feet, you can miss important details. When you're doing some deeper thinking on the bigger picture of your business ahead of time you can map out the smaller steps in between significant moves.
You won't have time to sit on your couch and just strategize once you've really got the ball rolling. You may not have all the answers but putting your thoughts down in a structured business plan gives you a resource to refer back to to connect the parts.
You'll have something to refer back to when you're on the move making things happen. It helps you gain perspective on how you connected ideas together that manifest as concrete action steps.
This is especially helpful when you've spent time ahead of time analyzing your competition so you know how you can stand out - or at least have a starting place.
Go Find Smart People to Criticize You
After creating your business plan, structured for stay-at-home, online-friendly covid reality, then find the three smartest people you know.
You know who these people are, they are the super smart folks around you in your friends circle or even co-workers from present or previous jobs.
It would be even better if they also run their own business. Either way, you want them to give you hard criticism on your ideas. Because this helps you increase your ability to make your business better.
Be prepared to hear some hard words. Go into it expecting they will tell you your ideas suck. Don't fish for compliments. Lean into their criticisms. Ask open ended follow up questions.
Remember - your goal is to get them to poke holes in your strategy and future visions so you know where you can improve.
It's highly likely if they see things you aren't seeing, and you want to get investors, those angel investors will see the same things or some of them as well.
Thinking up objections ahead of time and better yet solving them puts you ahead of the rest.
Get Yer Legals Set
Make sure you understand the basics on what you need to do for local taxes, which vary state to state. For example if you're starting an e-commerce store you need to buy at the least an LLC or sole proprietorship, and a sales tax license.
You'll want to get a business bank account to separate your taxable income from your business from your personal finances. It'll be set up with a business EIN number, which is like your social security number for businesses.
Invest in a good attorney and a good accountant. Prioritize the accountant first as you'll want to make sure you don't owe the IRS money. You can hire an attorney after you start making income. When you're ready to scale, you have to make sure your books are straight.
And of course, make sure you have a website for your business, and a business email that isn't just @gmail. Look up Gsuite and how to connect that to your domain for a business email.
Find People Like Me
Reach out to entrepreneurs like myself who already run their own business and ask them for two minutes of their time.
You'd be surprised but many people who are very successful love giving back and helping the newbs out with advice they wish they knew when starting out.
[Hint hint - the reason why I wrote this blog]
Having a solid convo with an established business leader, the higher up the better, will help you see the gaps that laterally moving won't catch.
It's also inspiring to talk to those who have tried what you're doing and succeeded.
What are your tips for those starting out with a new business? Or, what do you wish you had tips about for starting a business?
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