How to Guarantee Small Business Success

 There is really no way to guarantee small business success. We have seen people who do all things right, yet their small businesses end up failing. So there is nothing you can do to guarantee 100% small business success. There are, however, several things you can do to greatly increase the chances of your small business succeeding.

Firstly, if you want to see your small business succeeding, you need to ensure that you create proper systems and processes. These are simply standardized ways of performing the various functions that have to be performed on a day to day basis in the business’ operations. If you don’t put some thought into the establishment of proper systems and processes for your small business, you will end up having to perform the various day to day functions in a haphazard/unplanned manner. This will cause your business to fail. What usually differentiates the most successful businesses (like Kitui Maize Millers) from lackluster ones is the existence of proper processes and systems. So what you need to do here is identify the business functions that need to be performed on a day to day basis, then ensure that you create standardized ways of performing them.

Secondly, if you want your small business to succeed, you need to ensure that you make the best possible hiring/recruitment decisions. Establish the best possible team. It is these people who would help you with the implementation of the proper systems and processes you would have created in the first step above. Having the business systems and processes is therefore just half the equation. You need to have people who have the right aptitudes and attitudes to help you in the implementation of the said systems and processes. And after recruiting the right people, you need to ensure that you train them as well as possible, and provide them with a conducive work environment for them to deliver.

Thirdly, if you want your small business to succeed, you need to ensure that you serve you customers in the best possible manner. The objective is to ensure that you are customer-centric in all your operations. You need to ensure that none of your customers gets the impression that they have been taken for granted. This aspect (of making the customers feel valued) is of course quite easy when the business is starting out and you have just a few customers. But as the enterprise grows and as the number of customers increases, it can get to a point where you are tempted to start taking the seemingly 'small' customers for granted.

Fourthly, if you wish to increase the odds of your small business succeeding, you need to manage its finances properly. At start-up time, you need to ensure that you deploy whatever capital you have in the most efficient manner. After that, once the business starts bringing money, you need to ensure that the money is proper accounted for, and used in a manner that truly takes the business forward. The richest musician in Ukambani uses this strategy, and he has been so successful that he now even has a relatively new Nissan matatu to transport his staff and instruments. This is also where the question of separating your personal finances with the business’ finances comes up. And this is also where the question of ensuring that the business always has proper cash flow comes in.

Proof of Concept: The First Real Test On Your Way to Starting Business

If you have tried to find financing to start your own business, you might have come across the term ‘proof of concept’ – where the financiers demand such proof of concept before they can advance you with financing to start a new business.
Proof of concept is not a hard term to relate with as it first sounds.
Proof of concept, as it turns out, is having paying customers to show for your business. Now the hard thing about all this is that developing a business idea from the comfort of your house might be easy enough as might be developing a business plan around it – all these being things which you and your alone do. But in order for you to get the proof of concept in the way of paying customers, you need to not only convince someone that you have a viable business idea – but actually make a product, (and a marketable product at that) out of that business idea, and then get someone to buy that product as proof of concept.
While the key to developing an effective business plan might be imagination, the key to passing the ‘proof of concept’ test on your way to starting business lies in consistent marketing and networking, if you are to get someone to buy the new product you have developed, and thereby earn proof of concept. Now marketing as carried out at this stage is quite different from marketing as it usually carried out, given that at this point you probably won’t have the budget for an elaborate marketing campaign, and you have to rely on direct selling for the product you have developed – mainly through networking (maybe presenting yourself at exhibitions for the new product you have developed) but as long as you new business idea is geared towards meeting an important need in the society, someone is bound to buy it – and therefore give you the proof of concept which financiers might require of you.

Looking for Start Up Finance: The Second Step in Starting Business

There is nowhere, perhaps, where the adage that money makes the world go round can be truer than in the world of business. You might have the best new business idea in the world, but if you can’t secure financing for it, that it is bound to be stillborn. It is also in looking for start finance that you are bound to find your first real challenge in the entrepreneurship process – which could possibly turn into an obstacle, to starting your own business. As it were, the steps to starting business preceding looking for start up capital involve you and you alone – finding inspiration for business for instance, developing a business plan sketch around that inspiration, developing a business plan – all these are thing you can comfortably do from your bedroom without having to bother about what anyone things about you and your ideas.
It is when you get to looking for start up finance to get your new business rolling that you find yourself having to convince other people about the viability of your business idea – and believe it or not – many otherwise great business ideas meet their death at this stage.
The death of business ideas at the stage of looking for start up capital occurs when entrepreneurs meet rejection, and they are unable to deal with such rejection effectively.
Ultimately, though, the key to securing start up finance for your business lies in ensuring that you have a viable business idea (through objective techniques like QT quantitative techniques), developing an attractive business plan around the business idea and then ensuring that you are selling the idea to the right people – because there are some financiers who are not only known to be discouragers to the people who approach them looking for financing, but who have also been known to later seek to benefit from the same ideas, having discouraged the initial thinkers.
All in all, if other entrepreneurs before you have managed to get business finance for their new businesses (some of which were surely not as brilliant as yours), there is no reason why you too shouldn’t. Take heart, because as long as what you have is (an objectively speaking) viable business idea, and you are talking to the right people, then your chances for success are high indeed.

Developing an Initial Business Plan Sketch – The First Real Step To Starting Busines

Whatever your inspiration for considering starting your own business, it is only when you get to developing an initial sketch of a business plan around it that we can reasonably say that your are on your way to starting business.
The initial business plan sketch you develop for your own personal use need not be a complex one. It need not even have the headings which are drummed into the heads of business students – things like the executive summary, deep financial forecasts, complex SWOT analysis and so on and so forth, though this do help in organizing your thoughts. You will of course come to need a business plan with all these later, that is, when you come to ‘upgrading’ your initial business plan sketch to something you can use in sourcing for financing for your new business. But the aim of this initial business plan sketch is to help you visualize in your mind how your business concept is to work out in the real world – and give you an opportunity to confront the reality of whether your new business plan is in fact viable or not.
The initial business plan, in this way, helps you to work out whether given the resources you have and the reality surrounding you, going into your own business is something you can serious consider, or whether it is just fanciful thinking.
The initial business can be done on any format and can even be sketched on the back of a used printing paper. What is important at this stage is not what you put down, but rather what the plan gets you thinking about your new business venture, it viability and its mechanics.
It is from this initial business plan sketch that you will eventually develop the fancy version of a business plan, the one to present to financiers, potential clients and so on. We discuss about the more complex business plan later.

Inspiration: The First Step to Starting Business

For those of us who love reading biographies of entrepreneurs, the most interesting part of such reading is usually when we come to the part where entrepreneurs state what the inspiration that drove them towards starting business was. Often the inspiration for starting business can be some mundane occurrence- while in some cases it can be as a result of some profound soul searching.
The reason why inspiration is considered the first step towards starting business is based on the understanding that almost every one gets a (potentially viable) business idea at some point in their life, but it is only a person a person with some level of inspiration that gets to act on that idea and create an actual business out of it.
If you are planning on starting your own business, then, you will have to find something to inspire you –and then act on that inspiration. And this holds true, whatever your business interests- the need to find inspiration that leads you to start your own business. Indeed, this need for inspiration remains, whether it is a completely new business you are considering starting from scratch, or whether it is an old business you are considering relaunching (keeping in mind that what many of us refer to as starting business is actually just re-launching an existing business rather than starting a new business from scratch).
It would be a difficult assignment to tell a person to go looking for inspiration for starting business consciously –as they might not even find it. Thankfully though, sometimes it is the inspiration to start your own business that comes looking for you. In this case, all you have to do is to keep yourself in a receptive state, as the more spiritually inclined might put it, and attend forums where you might find such inspiration – for instance online entrepreneur forums, offline networking meeting and so on – as well as reading widely (both reality and fiction [yes, fiction has been known to inspire new business])) – all these being places where you might find inspiration to start your own business.