Posted on 07/15/2018 4:04:18 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Starting a business entails understanding and dealing with many issues—legal, financing, sales and marketing, intellectual property protection, liability protection, human resources, and more. But interest in entrepreneurship is at an all-time high. And there have been spectacular success stories of early stage startups growing to be multi-billion-dollar companies, such as Uber, Facebook, WhatsApp, Airbnb, and many others.
In this article, I give an overview of 35 key steps for entrepreneurs who are starting a business, with links to additional articles addressing some of the topics in more depth.
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.
Here are some of the biggest challenges to starting and growing a business:
•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...
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
#1. Say “Good Bye” to your marriage and kids.
#36 Have a woman or a minority as the “owner”.
Yep
Not true.
You can still have a family life and marriage by using the power of concentrated efforts throughout your work day
However, your wife would need to understand that when you need to work you need to work and sometimes that means if you got to do it between 11 and 2 a.m., that’s just the way it is
Actually having a disabled veteran on the ownership team helps as much as the two you named. Little known fact. Don’t all e-mail me at once. LOL
And half your business too. And your house. And probably your current car.
#38 Set up slush fund to pay politicians so business can grow.
A good outline but a bit overly simplistic. Steps are a bit out of order as well.
I could, however, take this and expand on it but people in this fast food/microwave world wouldn’t be interested in listening to it.
Are you kidding? You could set up a successful Youtube channel with just stuff like that.
One of the biggest challenges to succeeding in your own business, is knowing how to grow and actually run a business.
No matter how great an idea you have, or how expert you are in producing the final product or service - the skills required to ‘keep the motor turning’, are far different.
As someone who’s been keeping the motor turning in my own business for twenty years, I know too well, how those basic skill sets differ.
Over the decades, I’ve seen new start-ups fail repeatedly, because the owners had no idea where their market was, how to effectively reach them, how to properly price their products for the marketplace, how to balance cash flows, when to make capital investments, how to keep proper books and admin, how to properly evaluate prospective hires, how to maintain discipline and a tight work ethic among the staff, how and why to manage by statistics, how to build their brand, where to locate their operations, how to separate personal relationships from business relationships, how to respond to competition, how to properly market their products, etc.
I was fortunate to have learned those skills running other people’s businesses for over fifteen years before starting my own. I often think that I would never have survived without that basic work experience.
I’m a minority, and my business partner is my wife.
That never helped us one iota in our twenty years in business.
Shorthand —> WMDVBE
Lots of companies give preference to buying from WMDVBE businesses to satisfy Uncle Sam’s regulations.
I would hire the pretty brunette in the article.
She looks smart.
It doesn’t seem like an ‘obstacle’ on the surface, but I recall reading long ago that one problem people with very good ideas can face is that they don’t really plan for success. There have been cases where an idea really took off but the business wasn’t prepared to keep up with its own momentum.
And sleep. And peace of mind...
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