Have you always dreamed of starting your own business? It’s actually much easier than you’d expect in today’s technology-driven world. In this article, I’ll show you how you can start a service-based business that capitalizes on your skills, talents, knowledge and experiences.
12 Steps to Quickly and Effectively Starting Your Own Business
Do you enjoy helping people find solutions to their challenges? Are people always coming to you for advice? Do you find yourself creating solutions for them without effort?
Do people compliment you on how your home looks or the way you dress? Are there tasks that you find a breeze and yet other people struggle to complete them?
If you love helping people and you want to monetize your passion this year, you only need to focus on these 12 steps. The best thing is that you complete the steps over a period of 12 weeks.
1. Mindset Shift
The first step is to change from an employee mindset to an entrepreneurial one.
Creating a profitable business takes time, diligence, hard work, sweat, and tears (well, hopefully not tears!). If you want to succeed with your business, prepare to put in some work.
Having a mindset shift when you start your own business makes things much easier down the road.
2. Identify the Perfect Business for You
Being able to help people does not mean that you can monetize your skill. There has to be an intersection of passion and profit. You need to identify exactly what it is that you’re good at AND that you love doing. You must also have an above-average level of skill.
3. Create Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Create a simple version of your product or service. This is something that will help someone get results without you having to go too deep into the process. This step should be easy because you’re just turning what you already do into a formal process.
4. Validate Your Business Idea
Most probably you’ve been doing this work for free or at a very low fee. In this step, you will take your MVP to the market to determine:
- If there’s a market need for the product or service you will offer.
- Whether people will really pay for what you offer.
- How much money people are willing and able to pay you.
This step will also help you identify the exact challenges your ideal clients are having that you can solve. By talking to them directly, you’ll tap into their dreams and desires. This will come in handy in steps 5, 6, 11 and 12.
5. Determine What Sets You Apart From the Crowd
Unless you’re building something completely new and revolutionary, you’re going to be competing against others. If you’re going to succeed with your business, you need to find a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Figure out how you’re going to stand out from the crowd.
6. Refine Your Product…and Sell
Use the results from steps 4 and 5 to refine your MVP and pricing. Take the second version of your product or service to the market once again and repeat Step 4 and 5.
At this point, you should be making some sales. The money may not be a lot yet, but you’re getting paid to do your product/service development and research.
Now that you have paying clients, you need to deliver what you’ve promised even as you work on the following steps.
7. Define Your Goals
By now, you have:
- A sellable product or service.
- Made some money.
- Gotten feedback from the market.
Defining clear goals will help you know the steps needed to turn your business idea into a reality. Lay out a set of goals that sequentially follow one another. Also ensure that your goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound).
7. Create Milestones
It’s time to get serious about achieving your goals. You’ve already tested your product or service. You now need to launch, refine, fix problems, and then keep going.
In order to launch, set milestones that will force you to take action. Setting milestones for yourself will ensure that you actually take action and don’t delay.
Every milestone should be SMART and tied directly to a specific due date.
9. Determine How You’ll Sell
Before you can launch your business, you need to determine how you’re going to sell your product or service. You can choose to sell physically, online, or both.
At this point, you also need to set up a sales system that includes among other things:
- A payment system: E.g. MPESA Till Number or Paybill, PayPal or Stripe.
- A separate bank account for your business: This can be in your name if you haven’t registered the business, but it must be separate from your personal account.
- A process for onboarding your new clients: This is the process you take someone through once they purchase for you. Automate the process as much as you can.
10. Sell and Deliver
Starting your business does not guarantee overnight success. In fact, your product or service will NOT be perfect when you first launch it. You’ll make mistakes. You may have trouble landing your first clients.
Regardless, you need to launch.
If you try to get everything perfect before you launch, you’ll never get started. Avoid getting discouraged if you don’t have massive success right off the bat. Keep working with your clients, refining your product or service, promoting and selling.
When you help your clients get outstanding results, they will come back and also refer others to you. Referral or word-of-mouth marketing is the best and most powerful form of marketing for service-based businesses!
11. Create Your Marketing System
To make your business as successful as possible, it’s essential to consistently market yourself. You need to promote your business so that it gets in front of as many people as possible.
Contrary to what you may think, social media is not the best at giving you reliable and consistent clients when starting. The best forms of marketing services are those that connect you directly with your intended audience.
Where can you find your ideal clients as individuals or in groups? Identify that space and position yourself there as the go-to expert in a way that creates value. Even those who don’t buy from you can send you referrals if you market yourself effectively.
For example, this is a marketing piece that is educational in nature. By writing this long post, I’m positioning myself as an expert in helping people monetize their passion.
Some readers will read and contact me. Others will browse through and ignore. Others will share it with their friends. And others will save it and come back later.
You too can:
- Write such pieces.
- Speak.
- Or connect with people in another way that educates, informs, and/or entertains them while still positioning your expertise.
12. Provide Your Clients with Amazing Experiences
One of the best ways to get new clients and keep your existing ones is to create amazing experiences for them. Your goal is to show them that you care deeply about them and want them to be incredibly happy with what you have to offer.
This also calls for constant refinement of your product or service based on the feedback you get from clients and prospects.
What about social media, business registration and all that?
These are important aspects of a business. However, if you’re starting from scratch, it’s more important to validate your business idea and get paying clients first.
Once you complete the 12 steps outlined above (which happens over a period of 12 weeks), you can then set up the back end of your business over another 12-week cycle. This includes:
- Registering your business.
- Creating your business plan.
- Hiring your startup team.
Want to make these 12 steps possible?
I hope this outline has helped you get a feel of what is required when starting your own business. If you’ve read this far, I’m sure you’re interested in starting your own business and I can help with that.
Since 2011, I’ve been helping professional women identify monetize their skills, talents, knowledge and experiences.
Over the years, I’ve developed a system that you can use to get started with only 10-12 hours a week to spare, so it’s something you can do even if you’re in full-time employment.
Interested?
Book a complimentary Discovery Call and find out how the 12 Weeks to Startup program can help you create a service-based business and have paying clients in 3 months or less.
(Image credit: Pixabay)
