Entrepreneur Blog

Are you thinking about starting a business? Is this your first business? Do you have a lot of financial responsibilities that worry you? Then you need to start small. Even if you have a degree in business or have done freelance work on the side there is a lot to learn about running your own business. Not only that even though you have a great idea it may take a while for others to catch wind of what you are doing. So you need to do some life planning and think about the worst case scenario.

I have, relatively, very few financial responsibilities: No kids, no mortgage, no car payment, no loans. I do have a little bit of credit card debt but nothing substantial and I allow it to exist simply to build credit. Even with all of that said I started small with my businesses. I worked part time until I was earning enough income to at least survive and grow my business. Obviously this isn’t the most desirable method as I would like to grow my business quickly and have immediate success but currently that’s not possible. Even if it were possible I would grow my business more quickly than I am now but I think that I would still start small and here are the reasons why.

The advantages to starting small and growing are many but here are a few of the ones that stand out to me.

1. Get to Know Your Customers: Personally get to know your customers and understand why they choose you over your competitors. This will give you a huge advantage in the long run. You will understand why you are successful and will be able to continue to take advantage of that strength. Many businesses are missing opportunities simply because they are not even aware of their own strengths.

2. Get to Know Your Product: Be an expert in what you do. If you understand your customers but don’t know your product you are missing another important opportunity to become more successful. You have to know how your product helps your customers and build your product to meet their needs. This will help you in all aspects: sales, marketing, customer service, and the implementation of your product or service.

3. Understand Your Process: Something that’s very important to having a great business is being organized and efficient. It’s very difficult to predict all of the things you will need to track, organize, record, process and generally do in order to properly manage your business. Starting small allows you to gain the experience and insight you need. Then before you are ready to take your business to the next level you can evaluate everything and refine your process so that it is a lean processing machine and ready to take on the huge increase in business you are about to sustain.

I’ll be writing more in the near future about starting your business. So stay tuned and let me know what you think.