Key Steps in Launching a Business

Get the agreement of your partner or spouse that you want to launch a business, because it’s a tough, often lonely pursuit, and you might not be yourself for a while.

Figure out if your idea is unique. Do a search using your business idea as a search term. Don’t worry; no one is likely to copy you yet, despite what the search engine promos say.

If it’s still unique, get a domain name through www.godaddy.com. They’re the easiest to use and most secure.

About the same time, develop a trade name for your business based on the domain name, and register it with your state secretary of state (or the entity in your state that covers trade name registrations, which you can find through a Google search).

Now you’re ready to launch. Do a tentative profit and loss statement from the bottom up, working from the cash you want to take out of the business, through the cost of goods/services sold to revenues. Break this down into a price that you want to receive. You might have to increase it if you have dealers and retailers in your projected distribution system.

Next, try to form a customer focus group of possible users to find out if they’d buy your product or service at the price you’re aiming for. If the answer is ‘no,’ then you might have to do a pivot or figure out something else to do or add services to your offering. You can’t force the creation of business.

At this point, do an Excel spreadsheet to find out how long it’s going to take you to get to the cash-out you need. What’s the worst case? (The best case probably won’t happen.)

How much money do you need to get to the cash position in 7 above? Where can you get it? You? Family and friends? Are you going to have to re-mortgage your house? If it’s over a million, you might have to go the venture capital route, which is a separate course. Suffice it to say, they have their own rules.

And finally, if you’re a success, expect to be copied, 5 miles away or 5,000 miles away in Russia, China, or the Philippines. We were.

And, what’s your next act? Entrepreneurship is addictive. Once you’ve done it, you want to keep doing it.

Good luck!