It’s an exciting time; you are on the brink of starting your own company and are gathering necessary information. There is no blueprint on how to succeed with your own business, but here are a few tips that might be valuable for you.
Know your limitations and seek help
You should know both your strengths and weaknesses. If you have this ability you will be able to support your known weak areas with help from others. If you’re a skilled carpenter but don’t know that much about economics and accounting, the right thing to do, obviously, is to get someone who knows to do this for you. This will save you both time and effort.
Your time is valuable. Use it to make money on what you can and know. Our experience is that it is smart to choose an accountant early to help you, and make sure that you got a skilled sparring partner to discuss with. This will get you into good routines from the start and make sure that the accounting and reports are properly done.
Many small businesses only need a small initial capital to get going, and in Norway, for instance, it is popular to use personal unsecured loans for this – like the ones from Lånemegleren.no.
Seek information
As we said in the beginning: there is no blueprint on how to succeed. How much information you should seek would be a weighing between time spent and relevance of the information you’ll find, but these days there is plenty of very good information easy accessible. For instance you could check out this site.
Make a business plan
When you’re about to start up your own business you’ll need a document that describes your business idea and how you’re planning to run it. The business plan is first and foremost a tool for yourself to use, but it also comes in handy when you’re going to present your idea to banks, partners, the authorities and so on.
If you’re looking for business partners you need to understand that they want to know what they are getting into. The job on creating this business plan will be an important part of the development process where you get the opportunity to consider your idea from all angles.
This again will give you a more realistic picture of your idea and it will say something about the opportunities in the market. This work will also help you to make the right decisions regarding your planned business establishment.
It is necessary to make ongoing revisions of the business plan as the prerequisites change. The contents of the plan can be different depending on the scale of the business, what you’re going to do and your priorities about what is important to include in the plan.
A business plan should include:
– A preface with personal information and information about the company
– Business idea
– Products/service and production
– Market (customers, geographical market, competition etc.)
– Market strategy
– Economy and budgets
– Need for capital and financing
– Organisation and administration of the business
– Action plan.
Also see: The key elements that need to be in your business plan
What are the chances to succeed?
Every year thousand upon thousands of businesses are established in England, but a great deal of them go down in just a few years. Be aware of the consequences of a failure before you jump into it. It can certainly be hard to establish your own business but then again: an even bigger reward if you succeed!
Starting up a business is normally a result of hard work, based upon personal and professional prerequisites, orderliness, good economy, extreme amounts of persistence and a great deal of patience.
People that succeed as founders and then succeed in running their own business often have a few common hallmarks: They take initiative and the like having the responsibility. They are open for new ideas, and they create and develop possibilities. They often say: ‘why does it have to be like this’, rather than ‘it has always been like this’. They have strong confidence in themselves and are familiar with their own strengths and weaknesses. They are persistent and does not give up. They listen carefully to other people when needed to and are skilled in the art of building relations to the world around them.
Summarised: they succeed because they spend the most time while simultaneously learning from their own mistakes. In order to prioritise your own business other things has to be abandoned – remember this.
Further reading on how to succeed in business
