Your first 5 steps to launch your own business

Grab your first 5 steps to launch your own business with confidence and clarity

Starting your own business is exciting with a lot of work. It can be overwhelming if you don’t have a clear road map of where you’re going. From this blog, you’re going to learn 5 steps that will help you start your business much faster and with clarity.

First things first, know that creating any kind of business from scratch requires a lot of your attention and hard work. But hey, you’re already a hard worker, which is why you’re searching to get started. So, let’s get into business!

Save this article somewhere you can come back to reflect on while you’re on the go!

Step 1: 

Your business journal should be your best friend; it can be a note book or notes in your phone or any system. Define clearly your next 10- 15 business moves. 

Let’s say at this point you’ve only thought about starting a business, but you still don’t know what your business is going to be. One thing you’d be sure of is whether it’s a service or a physical product. In any case, your first move should be to think about where you’re going to place your business to start building it. A ground for your business.

Suppose you’re interested in writing and would like to promote and talk about your business through blogs, then definitely you’d need a website.

There are some platforms where you can run your website for free with certain criteria. If you’re aiming for a broader business idea and want things done on your own platform on a budget, Mailerlite is a great platform because it’s easy to customize even on your own and they do the hosting for you. That’s where I’ve built my website, and I’m not a tech-savvy person, which made Mailerlite platform easy for me as it requires drag & drops mostly, almost like customizing a Canva template. It’s always better to do your own research to match your budget and needs. 

Blogging is a great way to sell your physical products and your services too, which is why I’ve highlighted this first.

So during this research, you’d also get a much more clear idea about what you’re going to provide. Anyhow, it should be something that interests you, something that you love to talk about and research. Doing the research about yourself is crucial to getting clear about what your business is going to be. Try asking yourself questions like

• What do people need that I can help them with? 

• What are some of the problems that I’ve already helped people with?

• What do I love helping people do?

• What am I good at or great at?

• What do most people say I’m great at doing? Etc.

If you’re good at something that you’d love to offer your service to, then you can become great at this service by gaining more knowledge on the topic or product. Learning through courses, audio programs, videos and books, to name some.

If you plan to place your business on social platforms ONLY, you should straight away dive in to getting your business registered under the chosen business name.

Once you've decided on the nature of the business, it’s time to give it a name. Having a clear vision of what you’d do and where you’d place your business will help you define your next moves according to your choice. When you go further around the 7th move, it will get harder, but keep on writing it down as a draft based on your knowledge and research. 

This can be tweaked and adjusted as you go, but the important thing is to work on a path with a clear aim. 

Ok, that’s a lot of grounding work you’d done in step 1. Hurry for you! Now let’s keep moving to the next step.

Step 2 :

Make sure that you complete each move fully before you get started with the next one. 

That includes all your business legal documents too. *Panic attack? * Don’t worry, my dear friend, because here’s a checklist of essentials to launch your business to keep you on track. 

Whew he he Ok, let’s move on to learn more!

Often times, what happens is that when we start to create something that isn’t familiar to us and when it starts to get difficult, we start doing something new.

Because starting things is much easier than completing them. Just think about how many times you’ve started doing something at home and at some point left it to get started with another. The same thing, or worse, happens when you don’t completely finish the task at hand in your business activities. Because before you know it, you’d find yourself getting overwhelmed with lots of tasks to be done, and this could exhaust you and diminish your spark and motivation during the execution process.

So tackling one thing at a time before moving on to your next task will be the wisest and easiest way to keep walking towards starting your business. I know this sounds so basic, but if you don’t keep track of yourself, you'll soon find yourself there.

So don’t aim for perfection; you won’t be perfect at first, whoever was, btw? Your good enough is great to go. Perfectionism comes as another form of procrastination. Which takes us to our next step

Step number 3: 

Don't procrastinate.

Do you know why we procrastinate in the first place? Procrastination stems from uncertainty. 

We’re afraid, because it feels scary to face the unknown, because we don't know or are unsure.

When you start to accomplish a goal and once it reaches the difficult part or the unknowing part, you get scared. Doubts will almost smother you even with what you already know. Things like,

who’s going to buy from me?

You don’t know what you’re doing?

There are already so many people doing it, and you don’t stand a chance.... A lot of other crazy thoughts as such, which will keep you stuck or, in some cases, backing away to quitting totally. But we don’t want that to happen to you, so you learn to move WITH the fear of unknown by becoming a great student who takes actions on what you learn.

Know that everyone who’s done anything for the first time was scared. Scared of the unknown and scared of the competitors too. 

There’s a FIRST time for everything!

Keep in mind that embracing fear and moving with it needs a lot of courage and help from likeminded people. Surround yourself with people who’d lift you up, encourage you, and help you think broader. I came to realize my procrastinating habits through my coach. A coach will be able to guide you and help you with your fears, challenges, research, capabilities, accountably and a lot more. I took courses and coaching plus did a lot of inner works and research to name some, when I first started. 

I help ambitious professionals launch their own business in 6 months without getting overwhelmed.

Book a FREE session to get started.

Step 4: 

Fill your calendar.

Draft a month’s calendar with your business tasks. Define the time you can spend working on your business. Set weekly goals; this will give you an idea of how many people you can serve conveniently during a specific time, if it is a service. If your business is based on product delivery, you should generate a system for your product delivery as soon as your customer pays.

This will also lead you to calculate how much you’d be able to earn at the beginning. The aim is to come up with numbers, because without numbers, your business won’t take you anywhere. 

You must have a separate calendar for your marketing strategies as well, which should include content creating days, emailing, blogging/posting, researching, and engaging with people to build a network. Plus, any other one which you prefer.

Having a traceable system is essential while starting your business as well. Don’t wait until you grow your business to start tracking and scaling it. You need to scale and track from the beginning to identify what’s working, what’s growing, and more importantly, what’s not working with less time.

When things start to get busy and you’re the only person doing everything at first, as in lots of cases when starting a business, you’d find it hard to be consistent and to expand.

Now with that, let’s move on to the last step I’ve summarized here.

Step number 5: 

Bring yourself out there when you’re not all ready and with some uncertainty. 

Yes, you read it right. Start talking about your business when you’re not ready; launch your business page on social platforms when you’re not ready, because you’re never going to be ready to launch, ever!

Preparing a soft launch at first will be a great idea to get started. You just have to get started at some point. Of course, you might not know how you’re going to get your first sale, but what you should mainly be focusing on is making it clear for your clients what you’re offering and how you can provide value for your customers. 

Of course, you’d want your first ever post to be a great one, and thinking about this post will drain almost all your energy up. Instead, design a great “welcome to your page” with your unique style and post it out there. Now, not that scary, right?

So, once you’ve posted a first post, it will act as a foundation for you to start stacking your valuable contents on top and enjoy building it.

PSS. Remember that everyone whom you confront after you start your business is not a customer, but building great relationships with new people will take you as far as getting introduced to other people who need what you’re offering.

If you’ve enjoyed this post and found it helpful to you, I’m offering you a free session with me to find out how I can contribute in your business-start-up journey, where I can help you launch your business in 6 months with confidence and clarity.

                                                                             Good Luck!

Cheers,

To Infinite Success 🫶🏻