Miranda
What is the best piece of advice for starting your own business?
Starting a new business is daunting. #business #business-development #entrepreneurship
6 answers
Miguel Palomares
Miguel’s Answer
Understand your Customer. This will allow you to solve their problems and add value. Unless you are able to solve someone's problem with better value than your competitors, your business will not grow. In addition, this will allow you pivot when creating products and services. Businesses that grow and stay relevant are the ones that understand their customer better than anyone else.
Miguel recommends the following next steps:
Austin L.
Austin’s Answer
Hi Miranda,
Great question!! I'll echo what my PwC colleague said about understanding your customer by adding that you should have an idea regarding how you plan to scale and grow your business. Every good business has a plan regarding how they are going to grow and expand and that is for a reason. Many people start a "business" by offering one product or service, that isn't a business; a business should be able to sell more than one service/product. Every business starts out doing one thing, but soon enough as they start making money they start offering something new. Think about your favorite clothing brand, they offer clothes for the different seasons and also come up with new designs every year. They sell all kinds of clothes (pants, shorts, skirts, dresses), accessories, and shoes not for fun, but they do so to expand and scale the size of their business.
When you start out, its okay to only sell one thing, but give thought to how you are going to grow your business. Businesses last through expansion, a company that doesn't grow and expand will die. How many different things are you going to sell? How many locations are you planning on having? How soon after your start do you think you can grow to another location? What's the market demand for your product? These are all questions that you should ask yourself so as to be able to develop a plan for growth and achieving scale.
I hope this helps and I wish you the best of luck in establishing your business!!
Best,
Austin
Renato Hideki Nishiyama
Renato Hideki’s Answer
To own your business and thrive doing it you need to dedicate as much time and mind to it, to plan how this business will be, how you will make money, how people will help you, what are the things that can go wrong (and what you will do if it happen), what are your next steps, etc.
Now, with the above in mind, to answer your question, think about the small projects you did in your life, which ones you did very well and which ones were just 'ok'. I'm sure you will find out that the ones you did best was because you were more interested about the success, so you dedicated more efforts to it.
In other words (and that is my first advice), you got to find a business that you are interested in owning, that you will have pleasure about thinking from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep - something that you are passionate about.
A second advice, things go wrong when you want to own a business. Failing is an option most of times, but you can't let this turn you down, you got to have the mindset that failing are learning opportunities for you to get there.
The third advice is about your moment of your life. If you want to own a business, do this when you have less to lose. Usually this is during college or even before college, not after when you can get a job that pays more than before college or when you already have a kid to care, etc. Interesting fact, there is a researcher named Guy Kawasaki (google him), he has very nice hints for people that want to own their business. One thing he found out is that the largest companies of the world have one thing in common: they all started from people that were really passioned about their project and had really not much to loose, were in college with not a lot of money. And that makes sense because if you don't have much to loose, you are willing to do more risky things, which is not true when you have a family already, for example.
Hope this helps.
sean wright
sean’s Answer
Make sure you set up your business properly with state and government licenses. Have a Bank, and a form of bookkeeping established. A great resources is the SBA (Small Business Association) which has great resources for learning about and working with you as you start and grow your business.
If you can, have a mentor or advocate in the business you are doing. They are your competition, but have gone through the hurdles that you will experience already.
Stephen Bradley
Stephen’s Answer
And, believe it or not, THAT is basically the whole process to getting launched. You just keep doing that over and over and over again: listening to your core customer, giving them a piece of a solution to react to, getting their direct feedback, making changes or improvements based on their feedback, and then starting with another cycle of the same process.
The reason it's good to start with a small, "core" audience is that it allows you to focus on solving one or two parts of a bigger problem - a small audience that all share the same problem will most likely give you consistent feedback you can easily build into the next pass of your solution. A large audience will give you TOO MUCH... and too different... feedback. It won't be so clear what's most important for you to improve next. In that case it's more likely you'll try to do a little bit to please everyone, and end up with a solution that doesn't really excite anyone. So start with a small, core audience and work through several passes to give them better-and-better versions that they can ultimately get really excited about. If you do that, they'll start paying you for it - and THAT is the point at which you have really started your business! Then you have a core set of passionate customers. From that strong base it is much easier to broaden your market, and expand your solution.
GOOD LUCK TO YOU!!!
Ruby Rodriguez
Ruby’s Answer
Hi Miranda,
The best piece of advice for starting your own business is best said by a key note speaker I had the privilege of listening to.
"If you lose sight, you lose the fight" - Carey Lohrenz
Which means to never lose sight of your vision. One tip that I got from Carey is give yourself visual reminders to help you stay focused on what really matters daily. Use post it notes to help you give you a an easy visual of what you stand for.
Good luck with your future in entrepreneurship!