Approaching Business Start-ups
(By Joseph Arhavbarien, MBA)
Thanks for visiting Rockedge.biz.
In this post, I begin a series on business start-ups the way I know it and have worked and still working through it, so I hope this series will help you learn and get resourced for your entrepreneurial journey.
Before delving into the subject of start-ups, perhaps it’s important to ask this important question.
What Are Your Motivations?
If you are asked, why do you want to start a business, you may give one or some of the following reasons:
to be my own boss - no more 9 - 5 or shift kind of work
to earn extra income
to come out of debts
to be an employer of labour
to achieve financial freedom
to achieve fame
The reasons are endless and most often very good and justifiable.
Some Business Start-Up Statistics
In the United Kingdom,
between 2018 and 2019, the total business population grew by 200,000 (3.5%). Source: Federation of Small Businesses
In the United States, people going into start-ups is on the increase.
The United States was home to 30.7 million small businesses in 2019
San Francisco and Silicon Valley are the epicenter of entrepreneurship, home to 13.5% of all global start-up deals. Source: Editor's Choice
No Doubt Many Are Now Becoming Entrepreneurs
From my experience of been in work and business for over 20 years, one thing needs to be clear before deciding to going into a business start-up.
That multi-million pound or dollar question is:
What type of business do I want to go into?
Many businesses fail right from inception because the premise or purpose was not clearly thought through and no research made as to whether the new entrepreneur has weighed the pros and cons.
Also, have you as a new business owner got mentored, learnt from the success stories of others and also seen where there have been failures in their career/business?
A survey by OnePoll of 1,000 leaders of UK small firms found that many respondents felt a lack of business experience and perceived skill deficiencies were key barriers to the growth of their companies, while 45 per cent said their businesses had turned out substantially different from what they had envisaged.
Mentoring and having a tested and successful hand to lend a helping hand to help you get started is always a good advice when venturing into the business world.
The above are salient and incontestable requirement before going into business start-ups.
At Rockedge, we offer you mentoring support. This I will dwell on in more detail as this series continue. At every point in your business journey we are here to help. To book online for business support you can click here.
To get you started please make a note of your proposed business. If you are just reading this post to stimulate you into thinking of becoming a business owner, I hope that by the end of this series some ideas will flow through your cerebral cortex to move you to take ACTION.
You as the would-be entrepreneur need to have a clear goal as to what you want to do in business.
I learnt in my High school days that Commerce is the act of buying and selling goods or services.
From this basic definition, one important question comes to the fore. That is:
Is my business about offering a product to customers or is it about offering a service to the customer?
Does this help you to focus a bit on your business direction?
If you've got enough capital, by this, I mean lots of cash or source to lots of cash , then buying a tangible product and going through all the legal, accounting, import and export issues that would be required for tangible products business would be fine. Often time this not the case for majority of people interested in going into business.
Even with enough money in your bank account, you need to make correct decision on what you either want to Produce or what you want to buy and sell.
In either case, you can only be deemed successful if you make a good profit. That is, exchange your goods (products) for money!
So, I urge you to think, research the market and seek to know what people want to buy before going into this route.
If you are limited in cash or do not have source to fund a product-oriented business model, then that leaves you, like my humble self (at the time of starting) and those I call the majority of people with the option of a service-oriented business. In today's world with a laptop and a source of internet connectivity, this opens one to a 1001 things one can do online service-wise and still make a fair amount of money with very little overheads!
I believe I am making some sense here? The options for business/commerce are two CLEAR CHOICES:
PRODUCT-ORIENTED
SERVICE ORIENTED
In my next post, I will take this even further. Please visit again.