How to Start Your Own Business in 2021 Step by step
February 07, 2021
How to Start Your Own Business in 2021 Step by step - If you want to start your own business this year then you are in the right place because in this article I'm going to break down eight of the most important steps to do this. learn everything that you need to know I also want to let you know that I put together a free checklist of these eight steps to help you stay focused and on track as you go through this process the first step for starting your own business is simple.
How to Start Your Own Business in 2021 Step by step
1. Decide what business to start
Now I know this might seem incredibly obvious if you've already made the decision but there are a lot of people out there who want to start their own business but they haven't decided yet and they can't move forward you can't move forward if you haven't made this decision yet personally, I had a lot of ideas and I really had a hard time narrowing down what business I wanted to start so that was my biggest problem I tried to start a few businesses at once and that really didn't go that well because I mean really building a business can be a full-time job it's a big the project even just doing one and if you try to build multiple businesses at the same time you are just kind of setting yourself up for failure not to say it's impossible but it's going to be a lot more difficult so set yourself up for success choose one business idea for you to work on at least for now you can always pursue other businesses other ideas later on but start by deciding on one business you're going to start.
2. Write a business plan
Now don't worry because this doesn't have to be a 20 plus or 100 plus page document describing absolutely everything about your business and everything you're going to do in the future it doesn't need to be that at all this can be super short super simple you can make a business a plan that is as short as one page or I have this framework that I like to use that's about six pages long but you can do it in just a couple hours at most and it is just going to really give you a lot of clarity about exactly what you're trying to do i mean you once said off on a trip without a map right without like queuing up google maps typing in the address of where you're trying to go especially if you've never been there before you've never built the business you're trying to build before and so you should have the best map you can or at least some sort of plan about where you're trying to go.
3. Validate your idea
Now this is a mistake that I see so many the majority of new entrepreneurs make when they're trying to start a business they have a business idea they write a business plan and then they get to work just building their business they're investing all this time and energy and they don't even know yet for sure if people want what they are going to be selling and so they might be building a business that sells a product that people aren't really interested in when you think about it that's pretty risky business I mean you probably wouldn't go and invest a whole bunch of your money into some random business that you have no idea if it's proven no idea if it's going to be successful but for some reason a lot of us myself included can feel very just free with investing our time investing our energy into unproven ideas, I don't want you to do this I want you to take the steps to validate your business idea this process involves market research where you go out and you talk to people who you think might want your product and you ask them if they'd be interested in it why why not and other questions about their related desires and they're related challenges and then you're also going to want to do some sort of beta launch of your product so this is where you make a really simple version of your product so before you spend all the time energy maybe money creating the product that you're dreaming of you just make some sort of simple version and you offer it up for sale and you see if people are interested in buying it and then once you get those for sales that really validate your business idea and then you can go back and build the product out even further and sell it for a higher price point later on.
4. Set up your website
Now if you're running an online business what this means is you're going to create your website do you have to have a website no, it's not absolutely required but it's gonna make running your business and building your business a lot easier so I really would recommend that you set up a website this really doesn't have to be that complicated you can DIY it completely from scratch with something like WordPress or you can use one of these nifty tools that exist today like Squarespace or Wix that makes building a website really easy.
5. Set up your business books
finances so you need some way to keep your business money completely separate from your personal money and also to keep your business money organized so you can use software to do this like QuickBooks or wave where you can just use a simple spreadsheet like a google sheet and do it completely for free honestly when you're first starting out that's really what I would recommend you don't need a big complex system to manage the few transactions that you're going to have and it will be much easier for you to maintain and also you will be able to really practically see where your money is going a lot more easily on a simple spreadsheet.
6. Build a sales machine
So now that you have validated your business idea and you know that people want the product that you're selling and you also know who those people are and you've set up your systems i.e primarily your website and your money systems to be able to process more transactions now you're ready to start to scale and that means you're going to take your product to the masses and start generating a lot more sales so in order to do this, you're going to need to figure out a good way to get traffic this could be just ranking your website on google or it could be making content like a blog posts or youtube videos or using social media marketing or using paid advertising there are lots of different options here but you need some way to consistently get traffic and visibility so that people find out you exist and then you need a process that takes that visibility and turns it into sales so this is sometimes called a sales funnel but whatever you want to call it you need some sort of process to guide people from first hearing about you to eventually making that purchase a lot of people especially those with a marketing band like myself uh want to do this whole sales funnel building process way earlier on in the business building journey I know when I started my online business it was one of the first things that i tried to do and I knew a lot about how to build a sales funnel but I did not make any sales with my sales funnel and the reason for that was I was missing a couple really essential things like traffic, nobody knew I existed so there wasn't any traffic flowing through my sales funnel I wasn't making any sales at all but also I hadn't taken the time to validate my idea and so the thing that I was trying to sell nobody wanted it and especially nobody wanted it the way I was explaining it to them and so I had to take a big step back and really start over from scratch and validate my business idea first offer my product directly to people and see how they responded to it and then I knew how to build a sales funnel that would actually convert actually, make me money.
7. Get Visible
You've built this process that can turn your traffic into sales but in order to make more sales now you need to rev up your exposure and what that means is you need to double down on your marketing, you need to get in front of a lot more eyeballs maybe this means that you increase your budget for paid advertising but for a lot of entrepreneurs who are just bootstrapping it means that they are going to have to get creative and do collaborations to team up with brands that already have audiences and get in front of a lot more people that way.
8. Grow your team
Get some help you need to hire some people so that you can delegate some tasks so that you can accomplish even more reach even more customers without having to work crazy hours yourself because here's the truth is an entrepreneur can be a very time-consuming thing in fact it can consume your entire life and I really don't want that for you and I don't think you want that for yourself either even if you love what you do even if you are super passionate and you want to spend all your time doing it there's still a cap on the number of hours that you have available to invest in anything and so if you want to grow your business beyond a certain point and have an even bigger impact on the world than you're going to have to get some help now you really don't have to wait to start bringing on this help until you have a crazy amount of profit and just like more money than you know to do with as soon as you start making money you might consider outsourcing some small tasks in your business just to freelancers who are working very part-time to get some things off your plate so that you can use your time and energy to really build the business and do the aspects of building the business that only you can do there are some things that anyone can do but to advance your vision for the company there will be some things that only you can do so now that you understand the eight steps of starting your own business what i want to know is where are you in this process have you decided what business you want to start have you written a business plan have you set up your website have you made your first sales about how to decide what business to start this is the most important decision that you need to make if you haven't made it already because you can't move forward to any of the rest of these steps until you have made that decision and I know that you want to make sure that you are choosing your best idea so that you aren't wasting time on an idea that isn't going to pan out in the long run.