One way for you to get a job is to start your own business.
Instead of waiting for someone else to hire you, why not set up a company and employ yourself? Some are natural-born entrepreneurs with a fantastic idea they turn into a successful new venture. Many want to earn more money or be their own boss. Some seek greater flexibility or a more favourable work-life balance. Many simply have no alternative, perhaps after losing their job.
Starting up a business can provide you with a more rewarding life, but there are no guarantees. The start-up survival rate remains low.
However, the good news is many new businesses do survive and if you take care of key start-up tasks properly and hire Acclime’s formation and incorporation of company, and in the right sequence, you can get your new venture off to a great start.
The Sage guide to starting your own business covers all the topics you need to start your business, including:
- Deciding when to launch your new business
- Boosting your start-up knowledge
- Deciding who you’ll sell to — and how
- How to analyse your competitors
- Creating a brand
- Writing your business plan
- Registering your business
- Managing your business finances
Start your own business
Start with an idea
If you’re thinking of starting up a business, you’ll first need to come up with a realistic idea that you can turn into a product or service. Find local support, including help with developing business ideas, on the National Enterprise Network website.
Register your idea
You might have already come up with an idea for a business you think there’s a market for, or invented something you think people will want to buy. Find out how to register your idea to make sure nobody copies it without your permission.
Turn your idea into a business
- Research your market – identify potential customers. Talk to them and find out if your idea is meeting a real need.
- Develop and plan – test your product or service with real customers, make changes, and test it again. Keep doing this until you’re sure there’s a demand for it.
- Find partners and suppliers – think about who you’re going to work with to develop and sell your idea.
- Set up your business – work out which legal structure is right for you, and whether you want to sell shares.
- Get funding – explore different sources of business finance, from bank loans to government-backed schemes.
Few Key Factors:
1- Timing
The way the start-up entrepreneurs tell it, it is tricky to start a business at any time – not just during a recession – but their particular business idea is so niche, so focussed, and so special that they shrug off the gloom and just get on with it.
The upside of starting a business during a downturn is that things can only get better as the economic climate improves, and you will have learnt an awful lot in the difficult times that you can use in the easier ones.
2- Idea
Lots of people go about finding their niche by using business school tools such as market analysis or sector research. Clever, but remote. Why not start a business based on a need you yourself have, that is not properly addressed by existing suppliers? Keep it simple, and answer an in-your-face need. If you have got the need, and the idea, then come the operational problems.
3- Tools
Most homes and most students are already equipped with quite a lot of the tools any business needs to reach a worldwide audience from day one. A laptop and a mobile phone is all the infrastructure a new business needs to get up and running.
- Laptops can edit sound or movies, design software, and keep track of all the details of a start-up business at minimal cost.
- Internet connectivity allows a start-up entrepreneur to collaborate with video conferencing at almost no cost, an extraordinary breakthrough.
- The internet also enables a new business to reach a specific, even worldwide marketplace with a minimal outlay.
4- Cash
Now, what about funding?
Starting any kind of business always used to need money: from savings, relatives, angel investors, a bank loan. The latter is reputedly horribly difficult at the moment. For several reasons, including the technology mentioned above, not having pots of cash is now much less of a problem than it used to be. Several of the start-up entrepreneurs I have met needed only credit-card loans to get their businesses up and running – a potentially costly route, mind.
Just get on with it!
Follow your instinct!
Find out more:
Listen to In Business on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday, 19 January at 20:30 GMT and Sunday, 22 January at 21:30 GMT
