How to Start A Business from Scratch (19 Steps to Successful Business)
We walk you through step by step, the top 19 things you need to think about and things you need to do when you start a business.
Start with a Business Plan for Your Business
We would encourage you to search the business plan on Google, learn about it, maybe get a book about it, and follow some guidelines.
But at a high level of business, the plan is going to talk about the purpose of your business, the mission, the vision, your strategy, how you’re gonna make money, your products, your process, your team. Which team looks like your culture?. And so, write all that down.
Think about your business plan. The big questions are;
- What’s your purpose?
- What makes you different?
- What’s your marketing plan?
- What are your partners that you’re going to have?
- What are the different roles in your company?
- What are their compensation plans?
Try to think about every single detail you can for your business. Try to see it from every angle possible so that you have a big picture understanding of your business and how it’s generally structured.
You can optimize it to get going, but you need a good starting point, which is like your business manual, to begin with, and that’s the process of building out your business plan.
You’ll learn a lot in the process. You’ll think of things that you wouldn’t have thought of had you not gone through the process.
Watch YouTube videos about creating a business plan, read books, talk to people, and understand all of those pieces.
It’s really the foundation of how you kick start all this stuff, and it’s supercritical, so make sure you start there with that first step.
Develop Your Elevator Pitch
Pitch your elevator pitch. Is your short sales pitch on your product or service?
What’s your one-minute sales pitch? Practice it with yourself in the car, ride around when you’re alone, and practice it with friends with the family.
You really need to nail that down and then, when you’re testing on people, ask them what they think about it.
Ask advice from other business owners that you know, see what they think helped them try to help improve your business plan. Maybe help you see around the corner on things you weren’t thinking about.
Also, to really understand your elevator pitch and what makes you different, that will be critical moving forward for your sales team, your sales process, your marketing materials, and your website.
You really want to nail down that tag line in that elevator pitch.
Save Money or To Raise Money.
After you complete your business plan, you should have a good solid understanding of what your monthly expenses were going to be.
What your startup costs are, what your marketing budget should be, and make sure you invest in marketing.
Remember, if you have $10,000 to invest in your business, Bill Gates once said, invest 9000 and marketing. It’s so critical to your success.
Thus, factor that into your budget, and what you’re going to want to do is save enough money or raise enough money to last an entire year.
Once you have that much saved, you’re in a good position to start. That gives you 12 months of runway to build up your sales volume to hopefully get into the green, right.
But if you don’t save up enough money, you’re going to be under a lot of pressure, a lot of stress, and you’re just not going to have enough runway to get things going.
Don’t save enough for two months or three months really work hard to save enough for 12 months now.
Hopefully, your business plan doesn’t make it so expensive to start your business, which is reasonable for you.
But it is a good thing to think about to start saving money and put some chips aside so that you have the funds that you need to give the business the budget that it needs to get off of the ground. That’s critical to your success.
Location! Location! Location.
Now, if you’re an online business, that’s a digital location and so think about your digital location.
What maybe are the keywords.? What’s the domain name? Where do you want to be visible? Where should you have your business listed in the digital world?
You might have a physical location like a retail store, an office building, something like that in the physical world.
Do research along those lines and really start to understand your location and the expenses and costs associated with that.
And what things you need to do to really be in that location?
What are the steps you need to take to Lock that location in? Put some thought into that.
Choose Your Brand Name for Your Business
Now, this is a fun step. We all like to choose our brand name. Put some thought into this come up with something that you like that’s catchy, but make sure that it’s easy to remember.
Make sure that it’s easy to spell; try not to make it too long. Make sure to check and see if the domain name is available. That’s big, so check domain names.
Also, check social media handles. Make sure social Media handles air available. You’re going to want a nice, cohesive brand if at all possible, that’s nice and easy to remember.
Easy to spell the domain name is available All the social profiles match. That’s really a good, strong brand. So put some thought into that.
Create Your Brand Guidelines for Your Business
Starts with your logo, design your logo, come up with something that you really like. Based on that, you can come up with your color palette, and that should be something that’s used on your website on social media, on your print materials, packaging, everything’s cohesive.
Same thing with fonts. Come up with the fonts that you want to use, the tag lines, and even things like the brand voice.
A good exercise for brand voices to think about the actors and actresses in the world and which one fits Your brand. The voice that you’d like to have is your brand voice behind your brand and then use it as a persona that you can always think about when you’re writing your content and speaking on your website or social media.
That kind of fits with that persona and that brand voice. That’s always an excellent way to target and think about that process.
But at the end of the day, you want a nice brand guideline. You want a package, maybe a Pdf that you have, where it’s all you know, outlined.
You could put it on your website on maybe your domain.com/ brand-guidelines where people can always access that information, download your logos.
This is really going to help you visualize your branding and what it looks like and how it feels how it sounds. Moving forward with your website, your marketing, and everything in between.
Choose Your Business Structure.
Do some research on this. Try to identify which one is best for you. Research all of those will affect risk taxes and a lot of other things, so make sure that you choose the right one to do your research.
Register Your Business
Register your business in your state/Country/County. Each state might have a different process.
It varies a little bit, so follow the directions, and it’s not a challenging process.
It’s not going to take a long time, but you’re going to want to make sure that you register your business in your state.
Again, have your tax documents. This is a really important step because it’s going to be needed for things like opening a business bank account, getting permits, hiring employees, etc.
Think of this like your business is Social Security number, state tax PIN. Number.
Set Up A Business Banking Account
If you follow the steps leading up to this, you have everything you need, so just go into the bank that you prefer and open up a business banking account.
Maybe even with the same bank, you have your personal bank account. It might even be easier that way, but you don’t have to do that.
You can use a different bank as well, so whatever you’re comfortable with, you need a business banking account.
Set Up Your Accounting
There are lots of software programs out there like QuickBooks etc if you don’t know a lot about accounting to learn about it.
Watch YouTube Videos on accounting, get a book, read it, understand the basics.
I would then encourage you to make sure that you have the right accounting person that your company or you hire a good accountant to help you and advise you finances.
It’s unbelievably critical to a new business. The last thing you want to do is get caught in the weeds on finances and make some mistakes lose track, cash flow, and everything.
If that’s not your strong point, build your knowledge up, and leverage somebody’s talents with such a strong point. Whether that’s a partner for yours or works with you or hire a local accountant to help you out with some business banking experience.
That kind of guide you, coach you up, and help you out along the way.
You can give them access to your accounting programs like Zero or QuickBooks so that they can access that information and basically help make sure that you’re on the right track with accounting and finances.
You will also need a company to handle are your invoicing and receipts. Example is Zintego, an online invoice generator and receipt maker for small business owners.
It provides professional invoice templates, easy to use estimate templates, and the ability to make receipts with a touch of a button. It also emails invoices directly and tracks when they are opened.
Apply for Any License Or Permits
This might change from county to state, and do some research on the type of business you’re starting and Google search.
Maybe what type of license or permit do you need for that type of business? Do some research to understand what you need, and when you get to this step, start working through the process of getting those things set up.
Set Up Business Insurance.
Make sure that you do some research on the business insurance that makes the most sense for your type of business.
This isn’t a step that you want to skip, because if you skip it, it’s for sure gonna bite you right.
Make sure that you’re covered in your protection for things like natural disasters, lawsuits, and everything in between, So make sure you get this setup.
Pick a Platform to Build Your Business On
You want a platform that you can manage your business on and grow your business on like a system that will accept and manage payments, take credit cards from customers, send invoices, etc.
You’re going to want a platform that allows you to manage your leads in your customers, and that would be a Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
You’re going to want email marketing, email automation, and text message marketing on the platform.
Also, you’re going to want the ability to ask for reviews and manage your reputation. It would be best to manage all your business listings and your locations to manage your social media and schedule all your social media posts to manage any ad campaigns that you might be running on ad channels like Facebook or Google, or YouTube.
You’re going to want all of that; there are one place and everything else you need to manage and grow your business.
Test the Business
This is time to go live in beta mode. Everything that you’ve completed up to this point put you in a position to do this.
Going live in beta mode means you’re going to want to give your product or service away for free to a handful of customers.
This could be friends, family, or anybody else that you know that is willing to test your product or service; give it to them for free. You’re gonna want to do this with ten people, maybe 20 people.
The beauty of this It’s going to really refine your process, your sales pitch, your sales collateral, your marketing materials, maybe your F A Q, maybe email templates that you’re going to need.
It allows you to refine your business plan, make adjustments, and build all the things that you need to be successful when you actually start taking payment, and it’s the real deal.
Now, after you complete your product or service with this user group, this beta group asked them for referrals. If they love the experience, make sure you collect all their feedback.
What could you do better and also ask for reviews?
You’re gonna want a good batch of good reviews out there online about your business and your product and service right out of the gate that’s gonna help you be much more successful.
So make sure that they do that right and follow up with them and tell that they do make sure that they list those reviews on multiple review sites like top-rated local Google Facebook so that everywhere somebody might be looking, you have good reviews about your business and you’re up and ready to go s
Make Sure That You’re Ready to Go.
The team is in place that you need, which oftentimes might just be you to start. But if you need anybody else to help you, make sure they’re ready to go and hit the gas pedal on marketing.
At this point, you’re gonna want to turn your marketing on, and you’re going to want to go live to the world about your business and actually start selling accounts and closing deals.
Never forget that sales are unbelievably important.
You have to have marketing, and you have to have sales because you could have the most incredible product or service in the whole world, but if nobody knows about it, that’s not doing you any good.
So make sure that you do marketing and use a marketing platform to get things going and get things rolling, and then make sure that you sell those leads with everything you’ve got and try to get your business rolling it off the ground and keep optimizing your processes from there.
Do more of what’s work and less of what’s not.
Optimize your business over time. So, every month, look back; what are the processes I could improve, right?
What’s the sales pitch and sales collateral that I could improve out of my marketing budget?
What worked and what didn’t work?
Let’s increase the budget on what did work.
Let’s decrease it on what didn’t work.
If you do this process every single month, you’re going to get better continually.
Create Raving Customers/Fans.
It would help if you had exceptional customer experience, so make sure that your customer service is top-notch.
There’s no better way to grow your business than to build it on the customers that you have made so happy they’re raving fans, and the referring people to you left and right for every customer that you earn.
If they gave you one or two or three or four additional customers, think about what that would do to your business. It’s unbelievable.
Investment and customer experience and customer service make that your company’s battle easy and your organization to build raving fans because there’s no better marketing than that step.
Give It Time.
You can adjust along the way. You can tweak your plan, tweak your product week, your service tweaker process, tweak your marketing, and that’s all normal.
But don’t quit. Don’t quit. Don’t give up, right Losers quit, and winners fail. But they continually fail over and over and over and never give up until they finally succeed. So, keep investing in your business. Don’t give up. Keep trying.
And that’s why the step of having a year’s worth of budget is important because you need that runway to Optimize your process over time.
After 12 months of just constantly trying to optimize and get better and better, I could just guarantee you’re you will be successful, so just stay after it.
Keep chopping wood every single day and don’t give up.
Learn & Research
To make sure you don’t miss anything important here is to do additional research on your specific industry and make sure that there’s nothing that you are missing here.
Watch YouTube videos, listen to podcasts, read books, identify anything and everything that’s absolutely critical and important to starting and scaling your business in your particular industry.