For any new business owner/investor, ensuring optimal results when launching your business is key to sustaining a thriving business for years to come.
The article, “A 4-Step Checklist That Will Increase Your Chances of Starting a Successful Businesses,” featured on Entrepreneur’s website and written by contributor Himanshu Sareen, offers a few important guidelines to help new ventures hit the ground running toward success.
“For entrepreneurs, time is among one of the greatest teachers. That sounds like a platitude, but with 90 percent of startups destined to fail, it’s also true,” writes Sareen in the article. “To be one of the 10 percent of businesses that actually become legitimate you have to show a tremendous amount of dedication, and put in an insane amount of time.”
He continues by offering the following four factors to consider before launching a new business:
- Analyze the market thoroughly. Many new entrepreneurs may jump the gun before thoroughly analyzing the market they plan to do business in. “We’ve all been there: You think you have such a great idea for a product or service that it’s meant to disrupt the perspective market you want to break into — no matter who you’ll be competing with,” says Sareen in the article. “The best advice I can give to people who are determined to start their own business is to slow down. Take the long view.” Analyze any perspective “barriers to entry” first. Create a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) board to help troubleshoot any potential snags in your venture plans.
- Be open. Get comfortable with the fact that you might have to dabble in a little bit of everything, even if certain areas of starting a business, such as finance or marketing, are not your strong suits. “There’s no shame in not wanting to handle different types of workloads, but the bottom line for startup founders is that you need to be able to operate as a one-person team before experiencing success,” asserts Sareen in the article.
- Don’t be scared to make imperfect decisions. In most cases, imperfect decisions are all you will get — even after your business becomes successful. A big startup killer is not making any decisions. No one can make the decisions for you.
- Learn from mistakes. “The most successful entrepreneurs don’t stop at making simple judgments. They go the extra mile and really analyze the mistakes that others make and synthesize solutions of their own,” states Sareen in the article. Stay observant and question not only why you would do something differently, but how you would do it differently. Learn from mistakes, whether made by you or someone else.
Read more on how to increase chances of success here.
