Eight Tips for Start-Up Success
If you’re like most new or wannabe business owners, you want to hit a home run right from the start. And who can blame you? You’re probably investing the majority of your life savings in your business, so you need it to succeed, right?
Here are eight guidelines you’ll want to follow to help you make sure the business you’re starting or buying has a fighting chance to survive — for both the short and long term:
1. Find something you’ll enjoy daily. You’re going to be working a lot of hours each week, most weeks of the year, without much time off at the start.
2. Don’t start if you can’t ensure a solid profit margin. So often people try to get by on the slimmest of margins and wonder why they don’t enjoy owning their business for very long.
3. If it’s your first business, think about buying an existing business or a franchise. You’ll already have enough to learn about running your own business without having to invent everything yourself.
4. Buy into a growing industry and market. Go to your industry association’s Web site, and make sure your potential competitors aren’t all going out of business.
5. Marketing and selling to new customers is expensive. Demand repeat business. Whatever you sell, you need to make sure that once you get customers and serve them well, they’ll come back.
6. Keep recurring costs to a minimum. The biggest destroyers of new businesses are the recurring costs, such as leases on cars, equipment and so on.
7. Get good advice. A good accountant, attorney, business coach or person in any other specific area where you lack skills or expertise is worth your time and money.
8. Be prepared to work really hard for the first year or two. Too many new business owners think that all they need to do is hang out the shingle to get business to come their way.
Photo by aniramYx.
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