Steps To Starting Your Own Business Quickly

Are you ready to take the steps to starting your own business quickly?

Whether compelled by need or just magnetically drawn by your passion for creating a solution, many people are in a position where they need to start a business today. One of the most pivotal keys to success is getting your own business up and running quickly. 

Some people spend years in the planning and mulling one idea after the other. They never get off the ground after they have a great business idea. Or at least miss out on the real opportunity. While there is wisdom in doing things well, there are many businesses which can be launched in just days. You can get going with one product, start selling, and use your profits to grow and expand to realizing your full vision. Here’s how to do it.

1) Pick An Idea

When you are thinking about the steps to starting your own business quickly, you may have many ideas, or at least service, product and feature ideas. A lack of focus will slow you down, confuse your customers and potential investors, and may derail this opportunity.

Hone in on one great idea. 

If you need to get a business up and running quickly, and income in the door, you will want to hone in on an idea which is ripe for the world. One that isn’t too ahead of its time. At least not if you want sales in the next couple of months. Make sure you are also choosing one that will last for the long run. You don’t want to have to start over from scratch again.

2) Test Your Idea

It may make perfect sense in your own mind, but if you want sales and revenues, it also has to make sense to others. 

Even at this stage, you can start getting vital feedback. Float your idea to ex-coworkers, bosses, peers, coaches, and potential customers.

Just be wary of the trap when it comes to the steps to starting your own business quickly. Many people will say they love it so they don’t offend you. The real test is if they will invest in it, either as a backer or to pre-order as a customer. If they won’t, you may want to keep tweaking until they do. The easiest way to streamline these iterations is to ask them what they would pay for. Have them back it up with a credit card.

3) Create A Pitch Deck

Create a simple pitch deck to organize your solution and business idea. This will help you think through any questions you may have overlooked so far. 

It will also force you to get clear and simple on what’s next and most important. All while giving you a recruiting and fundraising tool to gain the capital and team you need to make this happen.

Remember that storytelling plays a key role in fundraising and you will need capital to scale things up. This is being able to capture the essence of the business in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below.

4) Create A One Page Business Plan

Don’t get lost in making it complicated. You can always do that later when you have the luxury of more spare time.

If you want to start a business quickly, use a one page business plan.

Outline the basic thesis in bullets. Then bullet point out your next important milestones and to-do items. The simpler the better.

5) Secure Your Online Assets

You don’t want a fragmented online presence when you are thinking about the steps to starting your own business quickly. Or one that leaves you exposed to fast-moving competitors benefiting from all of your PR and marketing efforts and spend.

This is a common newbie mistake. One which can cost you a lot of business, having to write big checks to acquire matching assets you forgot about, or the pain and disruption of a rebrand.

Make sure you can reserve matching website domain names, corporate email addresses, social media handles and your business name.

Incorporate your business and acquire all of these assets at the same time.

6) Open A Business Bank Account

You need a way to get paid and to make payments that will give you the most tax breaks and legal protections when it comes down to the steps to starting your own business quickly. 

When picking a bank for your business account consider who:

• Offers all the online and mobile banking tools you need
• Has a good reputation for helping their customers in tough times
• May offer SBA loans or business lines of credit
• Is startup friendly

7) Recruit Help

You are not going to do this all alone. You are going to need help. Source those individuals and organizations now. 

This may include:

• Cofounders
• Core hires
• Informal advisors
• Fundraising consultants
• Business coaches

8) Get Your Store Live

You need a way to take orders and process payments from customers and this a key ingredient when considering the steps to starting your own business quickly. There are countless platforms to choose from. Use the one which is simplest and fastest to get up and running today. This is where you’ll also add credibility building factors and the information needed to convert prospects into sales in the most streamlined and efficient way.

9) Finish Your Product

It’s okay to do all of the above before finishing polishing your product. As long as you are 100% confident you can and on time. Now finish coding it. Don’t wait for perfection. They say if you are not embarrassed by your first version, you waited too long to launch. 

10) Launch

Don’t waste any more time and take action on the steps to starting your own business quickly. Hit publish, go live, make those sales calls and start actually doing business. 

Once you have money coming in the door you can improve on the product, add features and services, raise more startup capital, expand your hiring and everything else.

In the video below I cover in detail the steps to start your own business quickly which you may find interesting.

FULL TRANSCRIPTION OF THE VIDEO:

Hello, everyone. This is Alejandro Cremades, and today we’re going to be talking about the steps to start your own business quickly. Are you ready to take things to the next level from the idea to actual execution? There are a lot of people out there that are thinking about starting something, maybe one day, but the thing is that one day or someday never comes. There are people that have thought about how to go about the execution, how to go about the marketing, how to start selling, but thinking is different from doing. So, in today’s video, we’re going to talk about and give you some insights as to how to go from the real talking to the actual walking and to get out there and really be in action. With that being said, let’s get into it.

First, you want to pick an idea. Pick an idea where the market is big enough because that is going to ultimately, potentially give you the returns for that passion, for that sweat, for those tears that you’re going to be putting into it. It needs to be something that you’re extremely passionate about and somewhere where you can bring your skillsets and your expertise in order to execute flawlessly.

You need to test your idea. Maybe you can pass it by ex-co-workers, by family members, by people that can bring you that constructive criticism and that feedback so that it can help you in optimizing and iterating whatever you have. Other ways in which you can get some feedback is by creating a landing page or a meaningful and viable product that you can put in front of potential customers, and you can see their reaction. You can also do quantitative analysis by getting a lot of people to fill out a survey, or qualitative analysis, where you literally get on the phone, and you go into the conversation with a set of questions that you’re asking that potential customer. This way, you’re really getting all types of data points and potential validation, and you’re going to be able to understand whether or not there’s a potential market and a potential demand for what you want to bring into the world.

Next, you want to create a pitch deck. You want to create a pitch deck because the pitch deck is essentially grabbing the essence of the story, and you’re also putting it in slides so that you have it as a roadmap, so it can guide you, and so that also you’re able to explain it to potential customers, to potential employees, to potential investors. 

And, by the way, you can use the pitch deck template below where there are founders all over the world using it to raise millions, and you can just grab yours for free. Again, put in 15 to 25 slides, capturing the essence and using that as a roadmap. And, remember to use a good structure and a good flow so that ultimately it is storytelling because storytelling when you’re at the early stages of the business, is absolutely everything.

You can also create a one-page business plan. If you don’t have time for a proper pitch deck and putting all of the bells and whistles, one thing that you can do is create a one-pager, a one-page business plan, where you’re putting the thesis, or very simple bullets, like the roadmap or the steps to take in order to execute. Then, also, this is very well-used internally to guide you on your team in order to get to the next level.

Next, you want to acquire the online assets, whether it is social media pages, for Twitter, for LinkedIn, for Facebook, or perhaps your own domain. You can get your domain in places like GoDaddy, where you can just type in the domain, or either on auctions. You can see on WhoIs.net who owns that specific domain, so maybe you can even reach out and perhaps offer them something to buy it. But, again, you always want to keep it at a low-level in terms of price, so perhaps going into one of those sites where you can see if there are different variations might be a good way to go.

Now, again, don’t make the mistake of going out there to market, trying to market, and then all of a sudden, you realize that some of those assets are already taken, and then they can use that against you because then they’re going to try to get as much money as possible from you, and that may push you into actually pursuing a rebrand, which is where you grab your own brand and have to translate it or transform it into something else so that you can use whatever other assets that you could for that new brand. So, avoid getting to that level because rebranding is a beast, so now that you have the time, do the research, put in the work, and try to see if you can find those online assets for that brand that you want to create.

Next, you want to secure a bank account for the business. People need to pay you somewhere. I think from a tax perspective, it’s also going to be super helpful, and you need to keep into consideration the following factors.

• Offers all the online and mobile banking tools you need
• Has a good reputation for helping their customers in tough times
• May offer SBA loans or business lines of credit
• Is startup-friendly

You’re also going to need to recruit help. You’re not going to do it alone. You’re going to need help, and essentially, some of the people that you really want to surround yourself by are the following.

• Cofounders
• Core hires
• Informal advisors
• Fundraising consultants
• Business coaches

You also need to get your brand, your product, your service, whatever that is, you need to get it live, and you need to do that quickly. There are different tools that you can use to start processing some of those orders or some of those purchases. You can literally create a landing page in a day. 

There are tools like Instapage, which allows you to create a page without any engineering work. You can use WiX. You can actually hook it up to Stripe or Square, the credit card processors, or even PayPal, so that you can start taking in the money and extracting the value from that value that you’re bringing into market. 

It’s really important to know if people are going to be willing or not to pay for your product or your service, so getting this to market and understanding whether people are not willing to pay is going to be critical. So don’t wait. Make it as fast as you can.

Finish your product or service. Really, you don’t need it 100% – never – because you always want to grab whatever is minimal, put it out there, see what kind of feedback that you get, and then continue to iterate on that. You’ll eventually get to that 100%, but remember that this is a mountain with no top. When you get to the top, then there’s a new top that completely opens that you didn’t even know that it was there. So, don’t wait until you have perfection. You’re never going to achieve perfection. So, again, get something; get it out there, and listen. Listen to your customers; listen to your employees; listen to your potential investors and whoever that is, but just listen because it’s all in the listening.

Launch! Launch! Launch! Launch your product, your service, whatever that is, get it out there. Hit those blogs, media outlets, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, groups – let the world know that you’re coming out, that you’re bringing this idea to life, and try to see how people are starting to engage and interact with whatever you’re bringing to market. Again, get it out there and do it with a bang!

I would love to hear on the comment section below what you’re thinking about bringing to life. Also, Like this video and subscribe to the channel so that you don’t miss out on all the videos that we’re rolling out every week. 

And take a look at the fundraising training, which is the program where we help from A to Z with everything related to fundraising. There you will find live Q&As, templates, agreements, a community of founders helping each other all over the world, and you’ll find tremendous value in it. So, thank you so much for watching.