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Sunday, February 28, 2016

STARTING A BUSINESS: BASIC SMALL BUSINESS STEPS & BUSINESS IDEAS.

Having series of headache in starting a business or probably you don’t know how, where and when to start your business or perhaps you lack small business ideas with this article you can find out about small business ideas and the basic steps required to start a business. It will also give you insight to what plan you need to come-up with and the kind of personality you need to put-up to start your own business. Am pretty sure you will find this article as an antidote to your headache of starting a business or solving business ideas puzzle.

Assess Yourself: Do you have what it takes to start a business? I
must confess to you, starting a business as pros and cons. The sad story about starting a business is that it consumes substantial part of your time, your social life, and family relationship. Despite all of these huge sacrifices, it’s a fact that most small business ideas fail within three (3) years of operation. To cap it all, many small businesses who manage to survive the first three (3) years of operation do not realize their return on investment for several years. But the good news is that if you’re able to survive this great hurdle, you’ll get your financial freedom, job security and also, be an employer of labour in return. What a self-actualizing venture. Hence, you really need to access yourself, if you’re truly ready to cross this great hurdle. How do you get to know if you’re truly ready on starting a business mission? Watch out for what you have passion for, What educational qualification do you have, Does your current job experience merge whatever business ideas you’re putting up, Do you have an insight to the financial risk, and more questions to ask.

Identify a Business opportunity: It is quite important to spot marketopportunity so as develop business ideas & to kick start a business. You need to know how and where to find those opportunities so as take advantage of them. Spotting opportunities is not just enough but the readiness and capability to annex the opportunities is the key thing/factor towards starting a business.

Prepare a Business Plan: Preparing a business plan is an important toolkit in starting a business because it enables you to understand your business, what gap exist in the industry/market you’re about entering. It gives room for you to understand how to put the business together. In fact, business plan is a key factor towards starting a business because it gives you room to draw out the business road map in concrete terms, monitor the progress of the business and it enables you to spot your core competencies and competitive advantage. Starting a business could be fun and easy to start but the problem lies in sustaining the business from pre-mature collapse. A business plan forces you to review/evaluate your market plan, financial plan, market gap, available resources and capabilities, projected sales and also help to hold oneself to be accountable for the business finance.


Prepare Marketing Plan: Marketing plan is an important tool in starting a business, after coming up with your business plan next on board is to focus attention on specific products or services that meets the need of your target market. A hindrance to starting a business is the ability to differentiate yourself from existing players in the industry. At this stage, you must be committed towards valuable process, audience building mechanism, prospective customer/client loyalty. To be frank with you, without customers/clients, your business will not survive.

Finance your Business: Like people around me will say in Yoruba Language, “Enu didun, kin ro efo” meaning - You can’t use sweet mouth to cook vegetable soup. After having a well taught out business plan and strategy, you must also pay attention to your source of finance either through personal savings, bank loan, equity share capital, or through venture capitalist, etc.
You have to take the right decision in a bid to starting a business so that you will not fail even before kick starting a business. In our next article, we shall be writing on how to get business grant.

Other things you need to consider in starting a business includes Business name registration and all other regulatory bodies in the line of business you’re about to start.
Also, in starting a business you must give special consideration to proper book-keeping and most importantly, you must be cautious about all the necessary taxation issues such as VAT, Income Tax, etc. These basic requirements must be met if truly you want to start a business and if your business is prone to high risk or is vulnerable, you should consider insuring your business.


Final word: Starting a business is an interesting adventure and a prestigious surgeon. If truly you want to start a business, you must be determined to succeed no matter what hurdles you face and all sort of discouragement from friends, employees and families. You should have a never die spirit and I can assure you starting a business decision will be the best decision you’ll ever take in your lifetime.

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