Starting a business from scratch is not an easy thing. It takes a strong determination, a hard effort, and a willingness to continue learning. Just look at the inspirational stories of entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who fought hard from scratch to success as it is today.
So for those of you who are still afraid to start a business, it is time to revamp your paradigm. Eliminate prejudice that starting a business from scratch is something that is impossible to do. There are many ways to start a business that you can apply.
But for starters, you can follow these 10 tips of success.
1. Tailor Your Passion
No matter how often you hear it, passion is one of the most important factors for starting a business. Not even just to start, but also to manage it to success. To start and run a business, you’ll spend a lot of time refining all the linings. So if it’s not based on your love, then all the time you spend building your business from scratch will feel like a heavy burden.
2. Arrange the best business plan possible
Starting a business from scratch means having to prepare mature planning that is poured into the business plan. Good business plan is the key to the success of the business you build. You should map out your plans several years ahead. What objectives you want to achieve, and what way you will use it to achieve it.
There are many reasons why a business plan is an important factor before starting a business, such as to make it easier for you to get capital loans, to assess whether your business is enabling it to begin, as well as one way to convince investors to join your vision.
3. Learn the Market first
The main weapon in starting a business from scratch is a comprehensive market research. During market research, you need to learn the dynamism, who the competitors are, who and how the characteristics of your target market.
You can also find out which gaps you can use. Starting a business without understanding the market is just the same by storing time bombs. Maybe not now, but the effort you’ve built from scratch can collapse at any time.
4. Define your Product
Before you start a business, you’ll need to decide what products you want to offer to potential buyers. Whether it is service or goods. The product you offer must be a solution that can facilitate your potential buyers. This is why market research is a crucial step.
From deep research results, you can know exactly which products are right for the target market you want to go to. After determining the product, you can conduct a market trial. Throw your product to a limited market, for suppose in your family, neighbor, or friendship environment. But make sure that the results of your experiment do fit the market you want to go. The goal is to ensure that your product has its place in the market.
5. Improve Your Skills
When you start your business from scratch, you need to keep learning, learning, and learning. There is still a lot of science that you have to master to succeed your business. The ability to make sales, marketing, and network networks is a must-do.
Therefore, the way to start a good business is to diligently follow seminars, workshops, online courses, or mentoring. You can also learn business stories that are successful from zero to success. From their stories you can learn of the failures they experienced, and how to rise from the failures.
6. Launch your Business
After you have done all the planning and preparation then all you need to do is execute it. Remember that starting a business from scratch is not something impossible. Don’t step back when things don’t go according to plan.
It was a challenge that every successful businessman faced. From there, you can learn how to adapt to the ever-changing business world at all times. You can also learn how to rearrange strategies in a short time to answer the challenge.
7. Always do evaluation
Every businessman who has just pioneered his business must have made various mistakes throughout his career. But they managed to fix one by one such mistakes to success like now always evaluate each mistake in decision making in the middle of the road.
So, never an evaluation. For that it is important to keep all the records in detail as a more comprehensive evaluation material. To simplify your evaluation process, Moka has a COGS feature where you can monitor the purchase price for each item sold. Moka can help you calculate your average spend to monitor the net and gross profit gained from your sales.
8. Improve product quality
After you have done the evaluation, use the results to improve the quality of your product. Feel free to innovate in creating better products because no company is satisfied on one product only. If you do not improve the product quality, then the whole hard work to build a business from scratch will be wasted.
9. Have good customer service
In the early attempts, various mistakes were found. These mistakes may result in complaints from your customers. Therefore, you must have friendly, informative, and solutif customer service.
The point is when customers file complaints, you can provide a win-win solution. Thus the disappointment of your customers can be treated and the effort you have built from scratch will not be smudged by name.
10. Scale Up Your business
Starting a business from scratch is indeed a proud achievement. But your achievements can not stop until there. To run your business to success you have to scale up your business. You have to increase and enlarge your business to have a strong grip on the market.
For example, you open one restaurant fruit in one location. Sure you can’t forever rely on that one outlet. Open a branch in another location either with a franchise scheme or another. But the key point in scale-up is the consistency of your product’s quality. Do not after scale up, the quality of your product decreases sharply. The hard work of the year to build a business from scratch that you have been weakened will be in vain.
Well, what about you?
Indeed, many ways to start a business that you can apply. But it’s a strong determination that can make your efforts run smoothly. If you only dream of becoming an entrepreneur, without attempts to start then it will never materialize. Hopefully of the top ten tips can give you a lesson that the journey from zero to success is not impossible.