You would like to start a business but you are not sure about how and where to start? The illustration below will guide you through this process. This illustration and its explanation will help you to deal with core questions about your business idea.
The question „What do I want to do?“, as the basic question for all undertakings, gives you the opportunity to come up with something you really want to do. Compared to things you have to do (for instance to make a living), things you want to do reflect your dreams/goals, a road towards fulfilment and self-efficacy. You may have noticed that this approach is similar to the idea of Maslow´s hierarchy of needs, going for a higher aim than fulfilling physiological needs. I encourage to take a step in reaching out to what you really want to do. There are numerous tools which can be used to analyse your interests. RIASEC ist one of them and can be found here: https://www.hawaiipublicschools.org/DOE%20Forms/CTE/RIASEC.pdf
The question „What can I do?“ requires you to examine your capacity in reaching your goals. This may refer to your financial ressources, ability, possibilities, know-how and other things which are needed to get started. Please take proper risk management, knowing that it takes some time and effort to implement a succesfully running a business. The book „Generate your Business Idea“ published by the ILO – free for download under https://www.ilo.org/empent/areas/start-and-improve-your-business/WCMS_436192/lang–en/index.htm, may give your some ideas on what to consider while you figure out what to do.
The question „What am I supposed to to do“ calls for proper planning in implementing your business idea. In order to this, enough information should be gathered about the business itself (e.g. unanswered questions, market reasearch) as well as all legal requirements needed to consider in making proper panning. The following books (free for download) https://www.ilo.org/empent/areas/start-and-improve-your-business/WCMS_436201/lang–en/index.htm and https://www.ilo.org/empent/areas/start-and-improve-your-business/WCMS_584176/lang–en/index.htm may give your some ideas on what to consider while you figure out what you are supposed to do.
With the question „What should I avoid?“ I intend to give some important principles which should to be applied to your business. Isai Mathias brings it tot the point by saying that things that should carefully be avoided are: Lack of customer focus, Inadequate planning and poor execution of the business plan. These three are the things which make a business fail. Therefore, a clear understanding of your target market (and what they want an need), a proper planning with realistic financial projections, milestones and timeslines as well as proper execution of the plans by careful selected people ist very important for the business sucess.
The above illustration and its explanation make no claim to completeness when we talk about important things to consider when starting a business. It is, however, intended to give an overview on how to successfully get started. Some matters and challenges are specific and can not be takled here. With those, you are welcome to contact us for more support