The other day I was teaching one of my SEO workshops, which was booked for a group of new business startups. After the session, one of the students asked me a question, which really made me think. She asked: But how do you know that your new business is actually going to work? How can you tell when you are just about to start? And how do I make sure that my new business is successful?

She had a very worried look on her face and it looked like she was absolutely petrified of the prospect of going into something unknown. I had to take a deep breath and in as calm voice as I could I said: ‘The thing is, you don’t know whether your business will succeed or not, at the beginning you just need to focus on minimising the possibility that it can go wrong’.

After that she relaxed a little and we had a great chat about what to actually do to give your business a fair chance to survive.

How to make sure your new business is successful

1 WRITE A BUSINESS PLAN

Most people think, that writing a business plan is only needed when you want a loan from a bank to start your new venture. That’s true, but even if you are just starting from home with your own money, you still need a road map for your business. Because that’s what business plan really is. A road map to success (well, hopefully!). If you are writing a business plan just for yourself, don’t worry to much about the complex types of business plans, just draft something that makes a sense to you. I would always stay on the cautious side and always underestimate your income and overestimate your expenses. At least at the start.

2 GET A PART-TIME JOB

This might sound a counterproductive, but if you are really worried that your new venture will take a bit of time to develop (which to be honest it probably will…), it makes a perfect sense to take on a part-time job to make sure you have some money coming in regularly. To go from a full-time job to be being self-employed can be a bit of a shock to the system. Until your business gets established, your money might not be coming in as regularly as your previous salary would and that can of course cause real worry. And the last thing you want is to worry about money for the electricity bill, when you need all your mental energy to focus on building your business.

So, if you are now thinking, that getting a part-time job might be the smart think to do, let’s be super smart about. Rather then getting any odd job, get a job that either is related to your new business venture to get some experience or get a job that’s fun to do and won’t be stressful.

When I was made redundant I took a part-time job as a house stuart in a large country home, because I love history. Coming from a post of  Managing Director, this job was an absolute treat to do and I was always looking forward to go to work. This part-time job gave me the head space to work on my business, until the demands of my new business become too great and I sadly had to hand my notice in.

3 TREAT YOUR BUSINESS AS A REAL BUSINESS FROM THE BEGINNING

I’m not advocating to take on a huge loan and to rent an office, when you can easily work from home, but to start thinking about your business as if it was a properly successful business from the start. You don’t have to spend a lot of money, but presentation is everything, if you use it in the right way. Make sure that your website is nicely presented with good quality pictures to fit your brand. If you are selling a physical products, pay attention to your packaging. You don’t need to have a bespoke packaging from the beginning, you can do quite a lot on a shoe string budget, but make sure it’s clear, simple and again it reflects your brand.

4 FOCUS ON ONE THING AND GET IT RIGHT

To start off with keep things simple. Whether you are in a product based or service based business, develop one product or service well, test it, evaluate it and perfect it. You can always add more services or products to your range, but to have too many from the beginning can be difficult to pull it off successfully.

5 TRACK AND MEASURE EVERYTHING

When my SEO course student asked me the initial question about how to make sure her new business is successful, I thought to myself: ‘That’s really hard question, because you can’t predict the future’. For a second, it even got me worried – well how do I know that even after 5 years of being self-employed my business will continue to be successful? I don’t, but since I track everything I do, I have a sort of database which helps me to predict what’s going to happen. I know that I can safely take holiday in June, because I’m never that busy, but I know I won’t be able to take any time off towards the end of the year.

So, what do I track? Income, expenditure, all services and products (their sales, frequency of purchases etc.), website traffic, social media reach and lots of other smaller elements of my business. You don’t need to have any expensive software for this, a simple spreadsheet will do. What’s more important, that you regularly review everything and check it against your predictions in your business plan.

6 MARKET YOUR BUSINESS FROM DAY 1

So, unless you have a tons of resources and you have your dedicated marketing team, the chances are that you will need to become your own marketing department. To to make sure your new business is successful from the beginning you need to start to market your business straightaway and be consistent with it. The reality is that no matter what type of business you have, marketing can (and it should!) take up 80% of your time. No matter how brilliant your services or products are, if nobody knows about them, they won’t sell. You should include marketing strategy in your business plan and since that would be a blog post (or even a whole book!) on it’s own, all I will say here, is that if you only do one thing a day to promote your business it will build up. It’s best to have a plan, of course, but if that’s too overwhelming, just remember to take action every day to promote your business. Talk to your friends, write a blog post, update your facebook page, start customer newsletter, connect with another business owner that  has a complimenting services or products. Every little thing counts! And since you probably won’t know what will work to start off with, I tend to exhaust all the free ways of marketing before embarking on paid options. That way, you know you got the base covered and you can build up on what you have.

7 ASK FOR A HELP

If you really want to jump start your new venture, don’t be shy to ask for help. This can come in the form of a business mentor or strategist, local business support group or online business forums. Even if you don’t get a business coach at first to help you and guide make sure that you have a good friend who you can talk to and perhaps brainstorm ideas with.

So, there you have it my few tips on how to make your new business successful. I’m sure there are more, so why not let me know in the comments below. I love to know what you think!

With the very best of luck…ehm…careful planning…

Magdalena