7 Simple Steps to Becoming an Entrepreneur

                               

                                  7 Simple Steps to Becoming an Entrepreneur

Anyone who is thinking about becoming an entrepreneur should give it some serious thought and preparation first. You can’t just start up a new business on your own and hope that your approach to entrepreneurship will prove successful. A smart person who wants to become a business owner in her own right instead of working for someone else should take time to determine whether entrepreneurship is a logical step in the right direction. Some people are not capable of working on their own and some make better employees than employers. Becoming an entrepreneur requires significant forethought and evaluation before quitting your day job and investing time and money that you could easily lose. Below are seven basic steps that can move someone toward becoming an entrepreneur with a successful business.

Be willing to take risks. Any startup business involves risks, the ultimate one, of course, being the possibility of failure. If you are uneasy about stepping out of your comfort zone, becoming an entrepreneur is probably not a good idea. For one thing, you could spend all your extra time (assuming you still hold a full-time job doing something else) trying to get your own business off the ground, only to have it fall flat. You are likely to hit a few glitches along the way, even if the business begins to take off. You might struggle to get enough customers or the right kind of customers. It’s not easy balancing the various facets of running your own business, from marketing, production, quality control, delivery, and accounting. You will have to develop a certain amount of expertise in all these areas or be able to hire others who know what to do.

But if you enjoy the excitement of uncertainty, and don’t mind dodging a few bullets, it’s possible that becoming an entrepreneur might hold a very satisfying and lucrative future for you.

Maintain a vision.

To start your own business, you need a driving force, a dream, a vision of achievement and success. You have to want it very, very much to get ahead of all the other visionaries out there with the same hopes and dreams. Entrepreneurship is more than a whim or flight of fancy. It is an enduring goal that guides you to make good choices toward its accomplishment. Your vision should be do-able. It should be measurable. It should be reliable in the sense that not only can it be accomplished, but it also will bear expected fruit and not turn into a disappointment or failure, at least as far as you can tell at the outset.

Establish a budget.

How much will becoming an entrepreneur cost? At this point you will need to draw up a budget to see how much self-employment will cost. Include estimated costs of an office to work from, equipment like a telephone and computer, supplies, postage, travel expenses, and other expenditures. Then it’s time to meet with your banker or a loan officer if you need to find investment capital or a startup loan. Be sure to look for the lowest interest rates and best loan terms. Finally, calculate what you can afford to put into the business, how much you will have to borrow, and when you might expect to earn enough profit to pay off debt and make a living.

Develop a business plan.

Once you have determined the shape of your dream and your willingness to take risks, write out a business plan that will put the dream into practical perspective. A typical business plan includes sections like these in any combination, and with more or fewer sections than outlined below:

-mission statement
-vision statement
-operating values
-history or inception of the business
-financials, including investment capital, income and expenses, and projected profits
-personnel (who will work with or for you, or your credentials for managing the business alone)
-worksite
-opportunities
-risks or threats
-five-year plan

You can download free business plan templates from the Internet and view models for other companies to give you an idea of how to prepare yours. A full or partial plan would be helpful when you visit the bank or loan institution to discuss borrowing money for the business.

Create a marketing plan. A marketing plan differs from a business plan (though the latter may include the former) in focusing on how you will alert potential customers to your available product or services. Advertising is one of the key duties of becoming an entrepreneur, so you will have to find the best ways of promoting the business to the general public in your area or online via the Internet when you build a website. Depending on what you are selling and the type of customers you want to attract, you may decide to use a combination of the following:

 

-radio or television
-newspapers or magazines
-billboards or outdoor signs
-website or email campaign / banner ads
-interviews, trade articles, speeches and presentations

There are other types of advertising and promotions you might want to try, too, but these give you an overview of some popular advertising options today.

Seek professional advice.

Unless you are extremely experienced and knowledgeable, it is likely in your best interests to find a mentor, someone who may be retired or at the peak of her career, to give you advice or guidance. Take her to lunch and pick her brain on becoming an entrepreneur. You may wish to tap the expertise of retired executives in your area of business, or contact a business owners’ association and ask about available resources. It’s a good idea to ask your customers’ opinions in a survey every year or so to get their suggestions for improving the way you do business to ensure they keep coming back and perhaps bring new customers with them.

Hang in for the long haul.

Becoming an entrepreneur doesn’t happen overnight. Success requires consistent effort, patience, and the willingness to ride out any storms that come your way. Small businesses sometimes have a tougher time of becoming successful because everything depends on one person—the entrepreneur, and a limited pool of energy and funds. The bad news is that there is just one person to manage the risks, bumps, and problems, which can be time-intensive and fray the nerves. The good news is that there is just one person to reap all the profit when it finally comes, unless you hire a person or two along the way. Don’t expect smooth sailing from startup to finish line. But if you can hang in there for two to three years, you have a good chance of going the distance.

 

It can be scary to go out on a limb and start your own business. If it folds, you could lose substantial savings and investments, not to mention time that could have been invested in working for a stable company and earning a guaranteed paycheck. But a person seldom finds as much freedom, opportunity, or personal income in another job as they might be able to enjoy in becoming an entrepreneur. If you are thinking of starting your own company, follow steps like those above to maximize your chance of success.

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