Four Must-do Business Start-up Exercises Before Starting A Business
It is a fact that a great percentage of small businesses close shop within three years of starting up, and this is due to a number of reasons.
It can be very painful losing one’s business, with all one’s life savings, including loans in some cases, going down the drain, not to add the enormous time and energy one would have put into it, hoping it would succeed.
To avoid getting in the list of “failed business ownersâ€, there are very important exercises or things an aspiring business owner must do before starting the business.
These exercises will enable you to see the viability of the business before committing your money and other resources to it.
It will also enable you to access yourself to determine if you will be able to run the business successfully or not.
Now here we go:
Assess Yourself
This is perhaps the most important exercise you need to do before ever starting a business. You need to assess your ability, experience, education, knowledge, and skill relevant to running the business in mind. This is no small way crucial to being able to run your business successfully.
If you do not have good experience, knowledge, and skill on the business you wish to do, it is safer not to go into it. If you do, you will most probably lose your initial invested capital because you are surely going to make mistakes that will cost you money, but which you could have avoided if you had some experience, knowledge, and skill about the business.
Even if you have the resources to hire experts or knowledgeable people to run the business for you, your success on it is still brighter if you are knowledgeable and experienced yourself. Indeed, since you are the originator of the business idea, no one can actually realize its success greater than you envisioned it.
You will need to provide the leadership for your team to follow to achieve your set goals. And to lead your team on the right track, you certainly need to have some appreciable experience, knowledge, and skill about the business.
If you haven’t got any experience of the business you want to do, you can get it first from getting a job with a company that’s into it or serve as apprentice for a number of years.
Assess The Environment
Having truly assessed your skill, experience, and knowledge of the business you want to do, and you are okay with it – that’s you have them – the next exercise you need to do is to assess the environment where you want to set up the business to determine if it will be viable there or not.
This is equally a very important thing to do before starting the business if it’s a business that requires people physically coming in to patronize it. A lot of small business owners fail because they never really studied the location where they want to set up their business before they set up shop.
They probably thought with their experience of the business, once they launched their products or services, they would immediately be flooded with orders, only to realize after the launch that there are only a few people in their environment who need their product or service, or that their target customers have little purchasing power, not enough to make the expected income.
A proper assessment of the business location will surely save you from making a terrible mistake setting up a shop only to find the business wouldn’t fly because the environment isn’t right.
To know if the area you want to set up your business in will be viable or not, you can get acquainted with one or two people who are already in the business or closely related business who you can talk with. The information you will need from them should include how much sales they are making each week or month. This will give you an idea about whether the market is big enough there.
Another way to find out the viability of the business where you want to set it up is to be a patron of one or two already existing ones there and observe the flow of customers and what they are asking for. You can take two to four weeks of regular visitation to make your conclusion.
Take Note Of Areas You Can Improve Upon
As you visit and patronize like businesses in that location, you should be taking note of areas in their operations and customer service where you can do better and provide greater customer satisfaction when you set up. This will surely give you a competitive advantage in that locality and help you to build your customer base quickly.
Talk To People Who Have Closed Shop
Another very important thing you can do before setting up a business to know whether it will be profitable or not is to speak to people who have operated the same business before, but have folded up. You will be able to find out from them why they packed up, and the possible pitfalls in the business. This will help you to decide if you can surmount the difficulties or circumstances that led to their failure, and make success of yours, if not, then don’t go ahead with the business.
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