Starting and Running a Business All-in-One For Dummies

Colin Barrow

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119361022
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

Written by a team of business and finance experts, Starting & Running a Business All-In-One For Dummies is a complete guide to every aspect of setting up and growing a successful business.

Featuring straight-talking advice on everything from business planning and marketing, managing staff and dealing with legal issues, to bookkeeping and taking care of tax obligations, this book is your one-stop guide to turning your business plans into profit. This amazing all-in-one guide brings together specialists in finance, bookkeeping, planning, marketing and sales, staffing, taxation and more, all of them eager to share their hard-won expertise with you.

• Discusses ways to identify new business opportunities and how to put together a business plan
• Get the scoop on securing the financing you need to get started
• Includes tips on finding, managing, and retaining excellent staff
• Offers information on marketing and selling your products or services

Book 1

Laying the Groundwork

Contents at a Glance

1. Chapter 1: Preparing for Business
   1. Getting in Shape to Start Up
   2. Confirming Viability
   3. Going for Growth
2. Chapter 2: Structuring Your Business
   1. Going into Business
   2. Safeguarding Your Business Assets
   3. Getting Help
3. Chapter 3: Can You Do the Business?
   1. Deciding What You Want from a Business
   2. Exploring Different Types of Business
   3. Assessing Yourself
4. Chapter 4: Preparing the Business Plan
   1. Finding a Reason to Write a Business Plan
   2. Writing Up Your Business Plan
   3. Using Business Planning Software
   4. Presenting Your Plan
5. Chapter 5: Establishing Your Starting Position
   1. Introducing SWOT Analysis
   2. Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses
   3. Analysing Your Situation in 3-D
6. Chapter 6: Researching Your Customers and Competitors
   1. Anatomy of a Customer
   2. Determining Which Customers Buy What
   3. Seeing Your Product through Your Customers’ Eyes
   4. Sizing Up Competitors
   5. Calculating Your Market Share
   6. Introducing Market Research

Chapter 1

Preparing for Business

IN THIS CHAPTER

Working up to opening up

Measuring your business’s viability

Growing for success

When you’re starting a business, particularly your first business, you need to carry out the same level of preparation as you would for crossing the Gobi Desert or exploring the jungles of South America. You’re entering hostile territory.

Your business idea may be good, it may even be great, but such ideas are two a penny. The patent office is stuffed full of great inventions that have never returned tuppence to the inventors who spent so much time and money filing them. It’s how you plan, how you prepare and how you implement your plan that makes the difference between success and failure. And failure is pretty much a norm for business start-ups. Tens of thousands of small firms fail, some disastrously, every year. Most are perfectly ordinary enterprises – catastrophe isn’t confined to brash Internet whiz kids entering markets a decade or so ahead of the game.

In fact, a quarter of all new businesses close their doors before their first year is over; a further quarter fail by their fourth year (for more on the reasons why, visit www.statisticbrain.com/startup-failure-by-industry). This chapter sets the scene to make sure that you’re well prepared for the journey ahead.

Getting in Shape to Start Up

You need to be in great shape to start a business. You don’t have to diet or exercise, at least not in the conventional sense of those words, but you do have to be sure that you have the skills and knowledge you need for the business you have in mind, or know how to tap into sources of such expertise.

The following sections help you through a pre-opening check-up so that you can be absolutely certain that your abilities and interests are closely aligned to those that the business you have in mind requires. The sections also help you to check that a profitable market exists for your products or services. You can use these sections as a vehicle for sifting through your business ideas to see whether they’re worth the devotion of time and energy that you need to start up a business.

You may well not have all the expertise you need to do everything yourself. In this book you can find information on the zillions of agencies and advisers who can fill in the gaps in your expertise.

Assessing your abilities

Business lore claims that for every ten people who want to start their own business, only one finally does. It follows that an awful lot of dreamers exist who, while liking the idea of starting their own business, never get around to taking action. Chapter 3 of Book 1 looks in detail at how you can assess whether you’re a dreamer or a doer when it comes to entrepreneurship. For now, see whether you fit into one of the following entrepreneurial categories:

• Nature: If one of your parents or siblings runs their own business, successfully or otherwise, you’re highly likely to start up your own business. No big surprise here, as the rules and experiences of business are being discussed every day and some of it’s bound to rub off. It also helps if you’re a risk taker who’s comfortable with uncertainty.
• Nurture: For every entrepreneur whose parents or siblings have a business, there are two who don’t. If you can find a business idea that excites you and has the prospect of providing personal satisfaction and wealth, you can assemble all the skills and resources needed to succeed in your own business. You need to acquire good planning and organisational skills (Chapter 4 in Book 1 covers all aspects of writing a business plan) and either develop a well-rounded knowledge of basic finance, people management, operational systems, business law, marketing and selling, or get help and advice from people who have that knowledge.
• Risk taker: If you crave certainty in everything you do, running your own business may be something of a culture shock. By the time the demand for a product or service is an absolutely sure-fire thing, there may already be too many other businesses in the market to leave much room for you. Don’t confuse risk taking with a pure gamble. You need to be able to weigh matters up and make your risk a calculated one.
• Jack-of-all-trades: You need to be prepared to do any business task at any time. The buck definitely stops with you when you run your own business. You can’t tell a customer that his delivery is late just because a driver fails to show up. You just have to put in a few more hours and do the job yourself.

Discovering a real need

You may be a great potential entrepreneur, but you still need to spell out exactly what it is you plan to do, who needs it and how it can make money. A good starting point is to look around and see whether anyone is dissatisfied with their present suppliers. Unhappy customers are fertile ground for new businesses to work in.

One dissatisfied customer isn’t enough to start a business for. Find out if unhappiness is reasonably widespread, because that gives you a feel for how many customers may be prepared to defect. After you have an idea of the size of the potential market, you can quickly see whether your business idea is a money-making proposition.

Aside from asking around, one way to get a handle on dissatisfaction levels is to check out websites that allow consumers to register their feelings, such as www.reevoo.com, www.grumbletext.co.uk and www.resolver.co.uk. Then scour blogs where irate people can complain their hearts out. Check out websites such as http://thebloggerhub.com, www.totalblogdirectory.com and www.bloghub.com, which all operate blog-indexing services that can help you filter through the 70 million plus blogs and reach the few dozen that serve the sector you’re interested in.

The easiest way to fill a need that people are going to pay to have satisfied is to tap into one or more of these triggers:

• Cost reduction and economy: Anything that saves customers money is always an attractive proposition. Lastminute.com’s appeal is that it acts as a ‘warehouse’ for unsold hotel rooms and airline tickets that you can have at a heavy discount.
• Fear and security: Products that protect customers from any danger, however obscure, are enduringly appealing....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Book 1: Laying the GroundworkLaying the Groundwork
• Book 2: Sorting Out Your FinancesSorting Out Your Finances
• Book 3: Finding and Managing Staff
• Book 4: Keeping on Top of the Books
• Book 5: Marketing and Advertising Your Wares
• Book 6: Growing and Improving Your Business
• About the Authors
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement