There’s a lot to think about when it comes to starting up your own business, ranging from weighing up your resources and calculating logistics, to getting a sense of just how you want your marketing campaigns to play out.
Not everything that you need to think about as a new entrepreneur will have a strictly technical basis, however. In fact, much of it specifically won’t.
Here are a few questions to ask when thinking about starting up your own business.
- How can you leverage and combine your existing skills and experience to make your service unique and valuable?
We live in an extremely connected age, where anyone can find just about any conceivable type of service after just a few moments spent searching around online.
Perhaps the most direct consequence of this, is that it’s arguably more important than it’s ever been before for a business to differentiate itself meaningfully from the competition.
Before you take any other steps to get your business up and running, you should ask yourself how you can leverage and combine your existing skills and experiences to make your services more unique and valuable.
It may be, for example, that you have some experience on the sales side of goods such as scaffold towers, while also having some insider knowledge of the health and safety industry from a more litigation-oriented standpoint. With these two backgrounds, you would be well-placed to offer a health and safety service that has something that many of your competitors won’t have.
- What are your motivations for starting a business? Are they likely to endure for the foreseeable future?
There are all sorts of different potential motivations you could have for wanting to start your own business. But, that doesn’t mean that all of those motivations are equally good, or equally robust.
With any start-up, you should always assume that success will require a significant amount of time and energy, and likely also various iterations of your business. Your motivations need to be things that are likely to endure for the foreseeable future, and which will keep you on the right track.
In other words; think about things in terms of your higher overall values, and not in terms of “getting rich quick.”
- Are you willing to embrace the journey and learn from shortcomings and failure?
Some degree of trial and tribulation is always inevitable when it comes to pursuing any sort of business venture earnestly and seriously, and there are few if any successful entrepreneurs out there who haven’t met with their fair share of failure.
A great question to ask yourself at the outset is, are you willing to embrace the journey and learn from shortcomings and failures as they arise? Or, are you hoping for a magical scenario in which you never fail, and where everything always works out in your favour?
Suffice to say, if you are looking for a scenario like the latter one, it’s unlikely that you’re going to find the life of an entrepreneur particularly fruitful.
