A: The essential steps include choosing a viable business idea, conducting market research, creating a business plan, choosing a business structure, registering your business, obtaining an EIN, opening a business bank account, securing financing, setting up an accounting system, finding a location, buying necessary equipment and supplies, hiring and training employees, creating a marketing plan, building a website and social media profiles, and launching the business.
Starting a new business requires a ground-up approach that addresses all the necessary steps, minimizing the risk of unforeseen circumstances that may hinder progress during and after launch.
Essentially, it requires a strong structure and lots of organization and coordination. In the absence of these elements, constant burnout might become part of your routine.
So, how do you make sure you don’t miss any of the necessary business startup steps?
Four words: small business startup checklist!
You may prefer to call it an entrepreneur checklist.
However you choose to address it, an ideal startup checklist should provide you with a step-by-step business launch guide that assures a successful launch.
The checklist should also help you avoid some common startup pitfalls such as funding, financial management, regulatory, legal, hiring, and customer acquisition and retention issues.
Following the structured approach provided by this small business startup checklist will help you properly attend to the factors influencing these issues.
In this article, you will familiarize yourself with an ideal startup checklist that covers all the major steps and constituting components, including:
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Every business starts with an idea and then a plan. However, for a plan to be purposeful, it must be backed by thorough research to extract valuable information that would be essential for business development.
Therefore, your small business startup checklist must start from the foundation of everything without skipping a step. Don’t jump to creating a business plan when you don’t know what your business is really all about.
So, first things first, you should:
As an entrepreneur, you likely see business ideas and opportunities in everything. Somewhere in your mind, you also know that some of those ideas and opportunities are not worth the effort.
It helps to shelf such ideas and focus on those that show promises of viability. Even with those, it’s important to dig even deeper and focus on specific opportunities or problems you think you can solve.
It also helps to evaluate yourself from the perspective of your target audience, to assume what they may expect of you and how your ideas fit into the picture.
Putting the final pieces together will let you know if you have a good business idea and check it off your startup checklist.
The next step is to go out there and find out what your target customer needs and whether the market is fertile for your ideas.
If we are to equate starting a new business to playing video games, then conducting marketing research would be an un-skippable cutscene.
Thorough market research helps you to understand your target audience, competition, and market demand. It typically involves the following:
Thorough market research provides you with all the necessary information you need to conclusively validate the viability of your business ideas and finally create an appropriate business plan.
Creating a business plan is where most entrepreneur checklists usually start. Although the reasons are understandable, you can tell that missing the previous steps can affect the quality of your business plan.
Well, now that you have gotten to this part of your small business startup checklist, what makes a good business plan? What are some key components that your business should have?
The key components include the following:
Other components to cover include the description of your products or services and your business organization and management.
Your business plan is basically your business launch guide. Put in all the efforts, time, and resources required to ensure it’s as accurate as possible.
Erring on legal and regulatory compliance could result in dire consequences. To be on the safe side, you should conduct necessary consultations to determine the legalities that could affect your business and do everything right to conform to them.
Entrepreneurs looking for ways to start a business must acknowledge that they have to incorporate their business in line with any of the various legal business structures available—there is not a lot of room for outliers.
It’s also important to know the implications of adapting to any of these structures, considering liability, taxation, and compliance.
The structures include:
As part of your small business startup checklist, it’s important to consult with a business expert or service provider to understand the fine print of business structures, especially considering that legal implications vary from state to state.
Services like Inc Authority can help you set up your LLC for free.
And talking about setting up businesses, how do you register your small business?
Registering a business involves various processes, and depending on the state, local government, or even the industry, the processes might vary a bit.
Typically, registering a small business involves:
Whatever you are doing during your business registration process, you should avoid recreating legal documents by yourself. Consult with an attorney or employ the services of LawDepot to get free legal documents, forms, and contracts or to customize necessary documents with the help of a legal expert.
As part of your small business registration, you must register your business with the IRS to obtain an Employee Identification Number (EIN)—unless you are running a sole proprietorship.
The EIN is basically your business’s federal tax ID, which is necessary for paying taxes, opening business bank accounts, obtaining business licenses, and hiring employees.
Your EIN is unique to your business and can be acquired via the IRS website after registering your business with the state and federal government.
Select your business type, and provide the information required by the prompts on the website to complete and submit your application.
Once you have your licenses, permits, and other legal documents ready, you are ready to open a bank account and get financed.
The need to separate your business finances from your personal finances cannot be overemphasized.
For starters, the distinction protects your personal assets if you ever have any legal or financial issues. Besides, it also:
The requirements to open a business bank account might vary slightly depending on the bank, but they mostly require your:
With those, opening a business bank account is nearly as easy as opening a personal bank account.
Cars run on gasoline and batteries; businesses run on cash. The question now is: where and how do you get the cash to run your business profitably and in the long term?
This is the part of your new business checklist where you consider how to finance your business. Some common options include:
Some small business tips to bear in mind when seeking funding include deliberating over your options, choosing less risky avenues, and ensuring your pitch is top-notch.
The better your pitch, the easier it is to secure funds. When preparing your pitch to investors, you should:
It’s always a relief when an entrepreneur finally checks off funding from their business startup steps and checklist. But in the long run, you might find that all the while it was actually the easy part.
Managing the funds and cash flow effectively and efficiently is where the hard work lies.
Do you prefer to run your business without major investors? Check out these small business tips for bootstrapping your business by Forbes.
You need a good, nay great, accounting system to successfully execute your small business launch plans.
A great accounting system lays bare all your business financial records, empowering your financial management practices with extensive visibility into your daily financial transactions, performance, and cash flow.
It works even better when you hire a professional to help you crunch the numbers and extract valuable insights that you ordinarily wouldn’t catch.
As a result, you:
Some great accounting systems to start with include:
If you are running complex operations, you should consult with a professional accountant with your industry’s experience to determine how best to approach your business accounting and bookkeeping processes.
Now that you have sorted out the crucial basics, it’s time to hit the ground running. Where do you situate your business? What equipment and supplies do you need to run efficiently? How do you build your dream team?
This is the part where a lot of people get stuck in their entrepreneur checklist. Whatever location you pick, you are going to be stuck with it for a while. When walking through this process, it helps to know that your location could greatly affect your business visibility, patronage, and even reputation.
Here, you should consider the following before choosing a location:
The global business environment has been witnessing a steady rise in remote work adoption since the pandemic.
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Virtual office space providers like Alliance Virtual Offices make remote work an easy decision for entrepreneurs. They provide meeting rooms and private office access in 1000+ locations across the globe, allowing small businesses to establish instant presence anywhere and be able to have occasional team or client meetings in a professional office setting when needed.
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Now that you have a business location, below is a list of some essential equipment and supplies you may need to check off your entrepreneur checklist, whether running onsite or remote operations:
These are basic supplies required to keep things going in the modern business environment. You might need more supplies depending on your operations.
With physical offices, you will have to include office furniture, printers, stationery, kitchen supplies, and security systems in your small business startup checklist.
Be strategic about sourcing and supplier selection. Go for reputable suppliers with excellent customer support and supply chain systems, ensuring that you are always attended to on time.
According to the small business outlook statistics created by NerdWallet, about 40% of small business owners are struggling to fill open positions.
A lot of reasons contribute to this issue, but sometimes, the problem is not having a streamlined hiring process.
So, here are essential steps to take when hiring:
While highly experienced talents may not be looking for jobs at a small business, you still want the best people for your team. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t great candidates out there who are enthusiastic about working and growing with small businesses.
What they need the most from you is training.
Go for candidates who share your business values and are happy to work with you. Be open to investing in their education and development and establish procedures to ensure that their onboarding is impactful.
This will lay the foundation for your employees to be properly engaged, have a strong work culture, have high morale and enthusiasm for the job, and be empowered with more skills that boost their performance and productivity.
More importantly, there will be higher employee satisfaction, which ultimately leads to better employee retention and overall business sustainability.
Note that employee training is not a one-off thing; invest in your employee’s continuous learning, ensuring that they are attending conferences and relevant training as many times as possible annually.
At this point in your entrepreneur checklist, you have your business license, funding, employees, and office space.
Your small business launch plan is finally coming together—what’s left to do is open your doors to customers. But how do you get them interested? Are you ready to open?
Well, these next items on your small business startup checklist will help with some answers.
Recall that your business plan outlines your marketing strategies, detailing how you intend to attract and retain customers from different segments across multiple channels.
This is the part where you transform those strategies into a solid plan.
Your marketing plan should have the following key components:
In all of these, your marketing plans and activities should be founded on insights and input from all departments and catered for with an adequate budget. This will ensure that your marketing and sales operations are streamlined for optimum outcomes.
Building on the need to establish an online presence, it’s crucial that you build a user-friendly website and set-up social media profiles with all the right strategies for building online communities across platforms.
Not only would this step make you more accessible to your target audience, it also opens the lines for seamless two-way communication and opportunities for people to develop common interests around your products and services.
More so, it creates avenues for you to reap the benefits of community-sourced customer support.
Below are some tips for creating engaging content and building an online community:
Checking this off your small business startup checklist creates a welcoming environment that makes potential customers want to know more about your business.
If you are at this stage, you are probably eager to throw your doors wide open to a throng of customers waiting at your door.
Before you do so, take a step back, take a deep breath, and crosscheck your entrepreneur resources and your new business checklist to confirm that everything is in order before executing the final step of your small business launch plan.
If the complaints are major, it may be necessary to initiate another soft launch after making adjustments.
If not, you are ready to launch your business!
Surely, checking off everything in this small business startup checklist means a long ride to launch. It also means doing everything right to ensure that, once launched, your business takes more confident and unwavering steps toward success.
From research and planning through legal compliance and financial planning to finally setting up your business, there is no step that you would want to miss before launch.
All the business startup steps are as important as the other, each paving the way for the next to be a more seamless and rewarding journey.
Further Reading:
And for as much as you are all about your business, it’s absolutely necessary to put your customers’ and employees’ needs at the center of every step to ensure employee and customer retention.
Remember, your location has strong effects on your business visibility, patronage, reputation, and employee satisfaction.
Alliance Virtual Offices helps businesses like yours get a business address in prestigious business districts and office buildings for as low as $48 per month.
We also offer more small business and entrepreneur resources and services, such as live receptionists, VoIP 411-listed business phone numbers, and other business services that guarantee you run your business more efficiently and profitably.
Contact us today for a free consultation to explore how Alliance Virtual Offices services can streamline your business launch and management for a much easier experience.
