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Starting a Business?- Start with these Five Steps

By: Henry McCabe

Step 1- Identify a need that you can fill. Many nascent entrepreneurs start with a particular product or service in mind and set out to build a business to sell it. By doing so they start with blinders on, potentially ignoring better business opportunities.  A better approach is to make a list of some needs that consumers or businesses have, and to then develop a business around the best one of them. Include the idea you started with, but do not rule out others.

 Step 2- Identify a way to fill the need. With your list of needs in hand, come up with a product or service that might fill each. One technique is to create a chart for each idea that matches the benefits and features of a product with the need that it will fill. The one with the strongest match is the one to pursue.

Step 3- Identify people with the need you can fill. Describe for yourself the important characteristics of the consumers or businesses that are likely to buy the product or service because they may have a need for it. There are three basic groupings of characteristics: psychology, geography and demography. I will delve into these factors in a future post.

Step 4- Figure out how to contact your prospects. Based on the general descriptions of prospective customers you have come up with, make your best guess as to how they gather information. Is it through traditional media, social media or personal interaction? There are hundreds of choices within these groupings to choose from. Select ones that best seem to fit as the place to promote your offer to them.  

Step 5- Convert steps 1-4 into a marketing plan. If you have completed the first 4 steps, you have the basis of a marketing plan. Consolidate the information into 1-3 pages of narrative and charts describing what you will sell, who will buy it, why they will buy it and how you will bring it to their attention so that they will buy. You then have the core of a business plan.

Planning

The only thing we know for sure about any plan we make is that actual events will turn out to be different. That is why we must adapt as events unfold.

Definition Quiz

What word or phrase is defined by the following? An organized set of activities designed to bring about a mutually beneficial commercial transaction between two parties.