Starting up a new business is a big task, and getting it right is crucial because there’s a lot at stake. But the risks associated with going out on your own are more than worth it, because the financial and personal rewards it offers can be significant – if you get things off the ground successfully. Below are five of the most important steps you need to take in the early stages of getting your start up business going in order to ensure you can get through initial growing pains and into long-term profitability. 

 

1) Lay Out an Air-Tight Plan

Creating your business plan is absolutely crucial to success for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it’ll tell you upfront whether the business is even viable or not. A business plan will cover every aspect of your potential company, from your products or services to your staffing, to your marketing, to your financing, and beyond. While a business plan will act as a guiding force throughout the life of your company, arguably the greatest value it offers is that it forces you to truly think through every aspect of your business so that you can identify potential problems early on, before they have a chance to cost you.  

 

2) Determine Your Company’s Structure

One very important aspect of getting your business started up is determining what kind of business it’ll be. The most common options are sole-proprietorships, partnerships, corporations, S-corporations, and limited-liability corporations (LLCs). Which choice to make is dependent on whether it’s just you, or you and one or more partners, as well as considerations like how much you want to insulate yourself from the company, how you want to handle taxes, and more. The topic is far too advanced for a short article like this one, but it’s crucial that you make your choice carefully, and talking to a lawyer is absolutely recommended. 

 

3) Make Things Official

Once you’ve decided on the structure of your business, you need to register your new company to make everything official with your relevant state or federal bodies. How complex registration depends on the structure you choose, and if you’re going for a sole proprietorship, it requires very little. But if you’re opting to incorporate, things get a little more complicated, and a lawyer and local registering agent are invaluable to minimizing headaches and making sure all of your documents are filled out properly. 

 

4) Bootstrap, Bootstrap, Bootstrap

In the beginning, money is almost always tight. Even if your company sees initial success and begins generating positive cash flow (or lands VC funding), a huge factor in your success is your ability to operate on as lean a budget as possible in the early days. That’s known as bootstrapping, and the best entrepreneurs are experts at it. The key is simply to understand that positive cashflow is the lifeblood of your business and that you need to treat your available funds like the extremely limited resource they are. 

 

5) Get Your Technology in Order

As an entrepreneur, you’re going to wear a lot of hats in your new business, and it can be extremely easy to become overwhelmed or burn out. That means its crucial that you look for any opportunity you can to streamline your workflows and reduce the workloads of you and your team. Customer management software is one of the most powerful ways to do just that, enabling you to manage all of your sales, lead-management, and administrative tasks from a single point of control. 

CRMDialer is one of the leading customer resource management platforms on the market today, offering a wide-ranging suite of tools including an advanced lead management suite, a full-featured power dialer, full Gmail and Outlook email, and scheduling integration, advanced billing and electronic payments, email marketing, analytics, and much more. 

For more information on how CRMDialer can supercharge every aspect of your startup’s operations, start your free trial today.