FIDELSEAL AGENCY 5.STEP GUIDE FOR ENTREPRENEURS STARTING A BUSINESS

FIDELSEAL AGENCY 5.STEP GUIDE FOR ENTREPRENEURS STARTING A BUSINESS

1. Understand the Commitment and Challenges Involved in Starting a Business

Starting a business is a huge commitment. Entrepreneurs often fail to appreciate the significant amount of time, resources, and energy needed to start and grow a business.

2. Coming up with a great and unique product or service

Having a strong plan and vision for the business

Having sufficient capital and cash flow

Finding great employees

Firing bad employees quickly in a way that doesn’t result in legal liability

Working more than you expected

Not getting discouraged by rejections from customers

Managing your time efficiently

Maintaining a reasonable work/life balance

Knowing when to pivot your strategy

Maintaining the stamina to keep going even when it’s tough.

3. Protect Your Personal Assets by Forming the Business as a Corporation or LLC

Never start a business as a “sole proprietorship,” which can result in your personal assets being at risk for the debts and liabilities of the business. You will almost always want to start the business as an S corporation (giving you favorable flow through tax treatment), a C corporation (which is what most venture capital investors expect to see), or a limited liability company (LLC). None of those are particularly expensive or difficult to set up. 

Many business owners, however, are under the mistaken impression that they are completely protected from personal liability by filing a Certificate of Incorporation for a corporation. This is not true. The mere process of incorporating does not completely protect the business owners. To lessen the likelihood of such personal or shareholder liability, you should make sure to adhere to certain procedures:

Always use the corporate name. The name of the corporation should be used in full, including “Inc.” or “Corp.” on all contracts, invoices, or documents used by the corporation. This clearly indicates the existence of the corporation as a separate entity.

3. Come Up With a Great Name for Your Business

Selecting the right name for your startup can have a significant impact on your business success. The wrong name could result in insurmountable legal and business hurdles. Here are some basic tips on how to name your startup:

Avoid hard-to-spell names.

Don’t pick a name that could be limiting as your business grows.

Conduct a thorough Internet search on a proposed name.

Get a “.com” domain name (as opposed to “.net” or another variant).

Conduct a thorough trademark search.

Make sure you and your employees will be happy saying the name.

Come up with five names you like and test market the name with prospective employees, partners, investors, and potential customers.

4. Focus on Building a Great Product—But Don’t Take Forever to Launch

When starting out, your product or service has to be at least good if not great. It must be differentiated in some meaningful and important way from the offerings of your competition‎. Everything else follows from this key principle. Don’t drag your feet on getting your product out to market, since early customer feedback is one of the best ways to help improve your product. Of course, you want a “minimum viable product” (MVP) to begin with, but even that product should be good and differentiated from the competition. Having a “beta” test product works for many startups as they work the bugs out from user reactions. 

5. Build a Great Website for Your Company

You should devote time and effort to building a great website for your business. Prospective investors, customers, and partners are going to check out your site, and you want to impress them with a professional product. Here are some tips for building a great company website:

Check out competitor sites.

Start by sketching out a template for your site.

Come up with five or six sites you can share with your web site developer to convey what you like.

Be sure the site is search engine optimized (and thus more likely to show up early on Google search results).

Produce high-quality original content.

Make sure your site is optimized for mobile devices.

Make sure the site loads quickly.

Keep it clean and simple; visual clutter will drive visitors away.

Make sure it’s easy for site visitors to contact you or buy your product.