1. Ask yourself how badly you want it.
Starting a business will be difficult, will strain your relationships, and will continually force you to make tough decisions.
Write down a list of all the activities and commitments you have in your life, with the amounts of time you devote to each during a week. Take note of the ones you can afford to lessen your involvement with, and let people know you are stepping back a bit to focus on a new project that means a lot to you. Think of the easy stuff first: time spent watching TV, playing video games, or surfing Facebook and Instagram.
The more time you can free up, the quicker you’ll be able to start seeing results.
2. Inventory your skills, abilities, and weaknesses.
Which skill sets does your new business idea require? You likely possess at least some of the necessary skills to make your business happen, but if you don’t, you’re faced with a tough decision. Spend time learning a new skill or outsource to someone else who can help.
In this Skill Assessment, you’ll list out every asset and skill your business idea requires and map those needs to what you can or cannot do for yourself right now.
3. Validate your business idea.
Fortune magazine recently conducted an intensive study of 101 failed startups, looking at the question of why startups fail according to their founders. The No. 1 reason most businesses fail, Fortune found, is a lack of market need for their product (this was cited by over 42 percent of the failed companies).
This really highlights the need to fully validate your idea and get honest feedback from potential customers before you start building, creating, and spending money. It’s human nature to think that we’re right and that our ideas are always amazing.
Unfortunately, our business concepts and product ideas are often not fully thought out, useful, or even properly researched.
4. Write down your competitive advantage.
A competitive advantage is defined as a unique advantage that allows you, as a business, to generate greater sales or margins and/or acquire and retain more customers than competitors. It’s what makes your business your business.
This can be in the form of your cost structure, product offering, distribution network, customer support, or elsewhere in the business.
5. Set detailed, measurable, and realistic goals.
Without setting attainable goals and realistic deadlines for yourself, you’re going to spend a lot of time spinning your wheels. It’s hard to get anywhere if you don’t know exactly where you’re going. In my experience, it works best to set daily, weekly, and monthly goals for myself. It helps me to stick with both the short-term and long-term objectives.
In the beginning, your daily goals are most likely small wins or to-do list type of items, then you’ll gradually start hitting milestones as you get closer to launching your business.
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