Things to Consider When Creating a Start-Up

Start-ups are by no means new; every business was a start-up at one point in its life, after all. However, the last two decades have seen an explosion in start-up culture as government support for small businesses developed hand-in-hand with new technologies and communications capabilities. Today, start-ups are much more possible – and the way forward for a healthy economy. If you have entrepreneurial ambitions, what should be first to mind before building your business?

Things to Consider When Creating a Start-Up

Your Concept

No successful business has started without a plan behind it. Whether that plan was drawn out over years or on a napkin is another thing entirely, but you need a fundamental concept with which to grow your enterprise.

What product or service do you intend to offer? What are the core demographics for that product or service? What is your competition locally, regionally, and nationally? What are the costs involved in bringing it to market? These questions need a solid answer before you start laying the foundations for your enterprise.

Staffing

Your next set of questions should relate to the internal structure. Your business will need staff, but how many? What departments do you need to populate, and what roles are necessary to create? Whatever the size of your business, close attention needs to be paid to recruitment and onboarding processes and meaningful structures put in place that looks after employee interests as you grow.

Software solutions are very much your friend here and have thoroughly expedited many difficult processes for new start-ups. Installing a human resource management system ensures that early processes can be automated for ease and that resources are centrally available to all starters. Meanwhile, new AI innovations simplify the sifting of data, reducing the need for data entry staff and enabling you to focus on your employment needs.

Funding

Whatever the staff makeup of your small business, decisions will necessarily rely on an essential and overarching facet of your business plan: funding. While it is absolutely possible to build a successful business with little to no funding, having more capital available to you at the start of your journey will dramatically improve your scalability and longevity. Funding can come from any number of places, from conventional banking and finance institutions to angel investors and even personal savings; what matters is how that money is put to use.

Marketing

Marketing is an unavoidable necessity for the institution of a new business. Marketing is the channel between business and audience, whether B2B or B2C. Again, there are multiple routes to marketing, often best explored in parallel to maximise reach and engagement – but arguably, the most important initial consideration is digital marketing.

By establishing a strong online and social media presence and allocating some marketing spend to either promoted posts or geo-targeted paid advertising, you can build a meaningful base level of interest before you start trading properly.