Top 30 things to keep in mind when trying to start your first business?

Have you been thinking of starting a business, but you get bogged down by the process, then you have landed to the right article. Listed below are the top 30 things to keep in mind when trying to plan and start your dream company:

• Product/Service: The first and foremost thing is to decide on what you plan to sell or provide to your clients. Basically, it is the idea that you want to implement. The way successful entrepreneurs approach this aspect is to solve a mass real life problem or a mass real life convenience that people didn't know they needed. Since business is something that you plan to do for a long period of time, choose a product or service that you are passionate about. This way your work doesn't feel like work but its fun to see things coming together.
• Sourcing of product/service: There are two options that you can either make your own product or ask a supplier for the same, but even if you are going to make your own product, in most cases you will have to get raw materials from suppliers. The point here is from whom and from where are you going to source your product or the raw material and how do you plan to establish long lasting relationships with the suppliers.
• Employees: No person in this world can have a huge company, serve millions of clients and work all alone. The most important part to understand here is that you need to have a very strong team which can handle the work delegated. This way you can use your decision making skills on more important matters.
• Financing Requirement: A business's objective is to make money for its shareholders, therefore, earning money is a very important aspect. But to build any profitable business, you will need some amount of money to start. This decision will include finding out where are you going to pay for all the expenses that occur in the business. Basically, you decide upon where to get capital for your business from.
• Location to sell product or provide service: Location will include researching the viability of your business rollout in different places. This will have a lot to do with where your customers are, because you would want a proximity to them. You will also have to take care that you are able to serve all the orders. Being excited to do a national rollout is good but keep in mind that you are able to handle the customer demands.
• Credit mechanism: Did you know that you can reduce your working capital requirement by using a better credit mechanism. Working capital is the money you require for day to day operations of the company. But how is that possible. Well, when you buy from suppliers, take a 4 month credit and when you sell to your customers, get upfront payment or give up to 2 months credit. This way, you have excess time to sell your product and pay the supplier from sale and not from your pocket.
• Pricing of product and service: One of the most customer sensitive aspect is the price of your products or services. If you are too costly, your competitors is going to get the sale. What you need to do is justify the price of your product by giving better customer experience or better product. Also, there is an industry standard that you need to maintain. If you are selling at an insanely high price above the normal market price, you will lose a lot of customers.
• Company registration: Money is a very important factor in a business. You can burn all your money without getting a single sale and also fall into a lot of debt if you have borrowed money from bank. Registration of a company helps you in two important ways. One, that your personal assets i.e. your house, car, jewellery are safe because you have a limited liability i.e. you can lose money only to the extent of the influx of capital by you and number two, you can get funding from venture capitalists, which is a no-no if you operate as a sole proprietor or partnership.
• Online Presence: If you plan to operate online, then your online presence which is your website should have a customer friendly layout, helping them to surf, buy and pay with as much ease as possible. When selling online, your website is everything the customer sees, therefore, give special attention to the look and feel of the website.
• Logo for business: Have you seen a tick sign on products (NIKE) or an eaten apple (APPLE INC.) or small blue bird (TWITTER). Well, even if I didn't mention the brand name, you would have guessed right. That is the importance of your logo. It is an identifier for your business. People remember images better than written text. So have an impactful logo.
• Colour Psychology: Different colours create a different impact on the human mind but why am I talking about it. Well, you use colours on your website, your product, your logo, your work environment etc. the green colour is usually healing and calming, yellow is happy and joyous. Use colours according to your product and customer age. The colour helps to identify your product easily even in a cramped space. What if I say a carbonated drink which has a red label is kept in the fridge, you will mostly guess COCA COLA. Similarly if I say a huge M shaped yellow letter is lighting up 200 meters away, you might think of McDonald's. This is what I am talking about. One for my Indian readers, a yellow coloured pack is kept in the noodles section, thought about Maggi right. I can talk about it a lot, therefore, i will write a separate blog on colour psychology.
• Slogan for business: Slogans are short and striking phrases that are easily memorised and are typically used by brands in advertising their product or service. For eg. McDonald's has the slogan "I'm lovin'it" and M&M has the slogan "Melts in your mouth and not in your hands". The more catchy your slogan, the more are the chances of customers remembering your brand and it attracts potential customers as well.
• Quality control: If you are a small player in the market and want to grow, the one thing that can help you survive by retaining customers is the quality of your product or service. If there is no standardisation in the quality, people will not reorder or require your services again. Therefore, work on setting up a quality control mechanism. For eg, if you deal in perishable goods like eatables, do you require a certain temperature to maintain quality and keep things fresh, then research and implement such quality controls.
• Storage/Warehousing requirement: Now, can you keep eatables in open for 1 year, no right, the food will get spoilt. However, when you keep the same in a cold storage, the perishable good might survive for even a year. If you are a chemicals dealer, the temperature at which a certain product is kept plays a significant role, so you might require a temperature regulated chamber. What if you make glass items, can it be kept in open and handled in the same way a steel item is handled. No right. Therefore, depending on your product or service you will need, different kind of packaging and warehousing methods. So when starting your business research on the storage and warehousing requirement for your product or service.
• Customer reordering convenience: Well, do you ever buy that chips packet again just because you liked it. And, what about the coffee that you drink every evening, do you buy it once and never again or you buy it again. Well, a majority of people like to reorder what they like and if they have to fill a form for their name and address every time they buy, it would be a hassle for them and they would buy from a brand which just requires your information once and then they can reorder just by a single click. So, making it convenient for your customers to avail the services or buy your product and making it even easier to re-avail the service or buy your product can make a tremendous difference. Some businesses who have products which are bought more frequently can implement the subscription plan that I talked about below.
• Marketing campaign: It is a saying that "what is visible is what sells". Have you ever bought a product which you have never seen and don't even know about. Not really, so it is very important to reach out to your potential buyers to inform them that you exist and can help make their lives easier. Marketing campaigns can help you to spread awareness about your product or service and contribute to the society as well. For example, organising a marathon with huge giveaways to the top 3 runners and having a social agenda attached to it like "girl education" can help you to get participants for the marathon, make them aware about your product or service and simultaneously contribute to the society by raising voice for girl education.
• Online Marketing/Digital Space: There is no doubt that the world has changed and we are more glued to mobile phones than books or physical activities. Therefore, came the need of online marketing because your presence need to be at those places where people are mentally. Online marketing has become a very crucial method to increase sales and target new customers. Your presence online has a lot to do with the value that people perceive of your product or service and at large your brand. Since, emotions are a big part of being human, most online ads target some internal emotion of the consumer and produce impulses of purchase. A recent concept that has come up in this world and by recent I mean this decade is that of VIRAL VIDEO MARKETING. Marketing teams work days and months deciding on a video that can get viral and shared by millions of people. This viral marketing helps the brand to reach more and more consumers and ultimately increase sales and get the benefit of economies of scale because of the larger customer base.
• Personalization feature: Humans have an emotional quotient and are driven by gut feeling as well. This is the reason that a drawing from a 5 year daughter might be more valuable than a 10g gold coin from a relative. This brings us to the need of personalization in any business. People love gifts which have their name or photo attached to it or it connects in anyway to their personality. You will therefore notice that these days brands have an option to customise and personalize a product to be gifted to a closed one and they charge hefty amount for it. Businesses, these days are making it possible for their customers and are improving their profit margin by including the personalization feature.
• Legal costs: A cost that many businesses fail to prepare for is legal cases. The day you start your business, it becomes vulnerable from all the stakeholders of your company and before you know it, a random person might file a case on your company for literally any minute issue and demand money for it. Many businesses get so caught up in solving their legal matters that their main business starts to suffer. For example, a man filed a case on Red Bull, because it didn't give him wings. Therefore, you should have a legal team in your company that is solely responsible for dealing with such situations.
• Business pitch for all stakeholders: Business needs capital to grow and you can't get money from an investor if you can't explain him your business. Similarly, if you want to sell your product to someone, the customer needs to understand your product or service before shelling out any money from his pocket. Similarly, if you can't explain your product to your employees, how can they decide whether they are right for the job or not. What I am trying to say is you need to have a business pitch ready with you at all times so that whenever you need to explain what you do to any of your stakeholders, they can understand with ease.
• Financial forecast: An important part of any business is to help improve the bottom line of the business i.e. the profits. So one way is to increase the price of your product or service and the another way is to reduce your costs. In a typical business scenario, you should try to work upon building financial forecasts on how a change in the way you operate the business can help the company to reduce cost and see if it can be done practically in real life. Sometimes you might get profit on the paper but implementing that in real life is difficult because humans are not comfortable with change, they will always resist initially because of being in comfort zone. But when implemented successfully it can reduce costs a lot. A financial forecast is also used to analyse where the business will be in 5 or 10 years and forms part of the business pitch as well. This forecast values also drive the investors away or in other case make it attractive to the investors.
• Delivery requirements: When you are opening your business, you will have to be at the disposal of your clients to deliver your product or service. This will include taking care of delivering your finished goods or your service to the ultimate consumer. So, a comprehensive logistics plan needs to be in place because you are not importing any bulk raw material from a supplier but we are talking about delivering millions of products to consumers doorway. One way that companies avoid this part of the business is by outsourcing it to logistics companies who are expert in this field. For example Shadowfox is a company run by Abhishek Bansal and his company is great in delivering products for you.
• Work environment: No one can deny the fact that a positive environment can help improve your productivity. Now, most of the businesses will have employees working on different operations and these employees are humans too, they get stressed out, tired and lose motivation too. A company should try to inculcate a work-culture that is growth oriented for employees, an environment that takes care of mental stress of the employees, training the leaders to support the employees in their personal problems as long as it doesn't hinder the companies productivity, and lastly an organisation that does not discriminate on any basis.
• Customer complaints resolution: An old customer who is regular is more valuable than 10 potential customers. When you start your business, you will want to improve your business and that is only possible when you entertain complains from your customers in a positive way and work on the free feedbacks. People tend to focus more on new customer acquisition. I wouldn't say that's wrong but only if you have a proper customer complain resolution process, you can retain old customers, make them feel important and grow your business with more stability.
• Scaling plan: What if I tell you that you need to be present at 100 locations at the same time, that is not possible right. So, how do you plan to grow your business if it can't run without your presence. A business should be such that it can be managed without your presence and that way you can scale it nationally or internationally. You should have a plan that how you are going to make your product or service available at new locations year after year. A major characteristic of scalable businesses is standardisation of work environment, product and service quality.
• Customer loyalty plan: Ever heard of the membership plans of companies and people boasting about it. Having a customer loyalty plan, makes your customer feel important for being regular and the level of customer service or product discounts can be upgraded for these loyal customers. For eg. Airlines have silver, gold, diamond and platinum memberships and the higher the range, the better the benefits. This not only helps to treat your customers better but also encourage them to spend more on your product to be at a higher level to receive those benefits.
• Surprise elements for customer retention: Just like we have giveaways by content creators, you can make a surprise element for your customers when they use your product or service. The surprise can be a 1 week family vacation or a meet up with a celebrity or a lifetime subscription to your product. This makes the customers feel excited and then purchase frequently.
• Subscription plans: The subscription business plan works quite well with those kind of businesses which require selling products or providing services on a regular basis. Take for example the dollar shave club which sends razors to your residence on a regular basis or the milk vendor that drops milk every single day or the Netflix subscription cost that you incur to enjoy latest tv series and movies. The subscription model is the best way to retain your customers because your business then becomes part of your customers life. Also, the subscription model is very handy for calculating future revenues as you have an idea of how many subscribers you have and how much they pay you on average every month. If you can make it work for your business, Kudos.
• Customer education strategy: Sometimes there is a need to educate your consumers about the usage and benefits of your product. You will have to devise a method to educate your clients. Very common methods followed by companies is giving a manual to the client, publishing videos on how to use the product, arranging seminars etc.
• Product loss/theft planning: We often take things for granted and are not prepared for an adverse situation. Human beings are designed in that way. When planning for your business you might forget to take the probability of a fire in your warehouse or a theft while the product was being transported. Therefore, insurance is a very critical aspect that you must take care of. Having an insurance helps the business to revamp the operations faster, instead of a lot of delay to restart operations.

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