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Six steps to start your own business

Six steps to start your own business
By Christine InStart-Up
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When you start your own business, it can be quite overwhelming. All of a sudden you become the marketing manager, the accountant, the sales person, the CEO, the technical person, the HR person – everyone and everything. There are also so many things to do and often you don’t know how to prioritise or what to do when.

What helps is to put it simple steps and work your way through step by step rather than getting demotivated by it all. Here is a short guide that helps you with it. You don’t necessarily have to go through them in this order but they are put in this order because I think it makes sense this way.

This is the Start-Up Formula that I developed and it is using the acronym CHANGE.

  • Clarity
  • Hold on to your values
  • Analyse who you want to work with
  • Narrow down the steps involved
  • Grow your confidence
  • Engage your audience

Clarity

In this step you should find out what makes you happy and set yourself a clear goal, because having a clear goal help you to achieve it and to identify when you have achieved it.

Important is that you not only set a goal but also how you will celebrate when you achieve it. You can use any kind of method to set your goal. Here is my preferred one:

  • As if now
  • Clear and specific
  • Hittable
  • In a positive direction
  • Verifiable
  • Ecological

Hold on to your values

Discover your business values. This will make your decision process much easier and is a good starting point for what you want to stand for.

Values are things that are important to us and your business. They are the foundation for everything that you will do in your business as well as your visual identity, tone of voice and more. Define your top 10 values, communicate them and stick to them!

Analyse who you want to work with

This is not only defining your ideal client but also your ideal business partners, colleagues, and suppliers.  It helps you to understand where you can find the ideal clients, how to talk to them and builds the basis for all your marketing activities.

Narrow down the steps involved

Here you look into the nitty gritty. What is actually involved in starting your own business? Things like choosing the right name, creating a marketing plan, checking insurances, building a visual identity, creating products and pricing and much more.

But again, once you made a list of everything that is involved and defined the steps, it is just a matter of working your way through it.

Grow your confidence

Everyone has a low point at some time with their business. Things never work out the way you think or in the timeframe you expect. You need to stay motivated and build up enough confidence to move forward.

There are a lot of different ways to grow your confidence. There are a few things I recommend to look into:

  • The museum of old beliefs
  • Timeline exercise
  • Submodalities

These are all exercises that help you to grow your confidence and are taken from the world of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming).

Engage your audience

Put your one year marketing plan together and know what each marketing activity will cost and how long it will take you. Once you figured out the activities, which of course should be aligned with your ideal client profile, you can put them into a timeframe of 30 days, 3 months, 6 months and 12 months. This way you created a plan for an entire year!

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