How to start business from scratch

How to Start Business From Scratch

Starting business from scratch is not easy, however you have designed your approach and plan it well, it can create wonders in your life. There are many factors you need to consider when it comes to setting up a successful business, and the first think you need to have is patience and acceptance of failure. If you are not ready to face failures, you will never succeed in your business. I wanted to write this article to help others on how you can build a successful business.

So lets get started…

Things you need to know about setting up a business

To start any business or if you have already set up a business how to scale it is a daunting task, if you think that you will just join a mentorship program and it will all happen automatically, then you are in a deep hole of hope selling business. Where you are being fooled by these mentors that you will be crorepati/millionaire within 4 months. I was a part of such mentorship program, and this is my learned that you cannot be a successful business person unless you have commitment, consistency and appetite to manage failures. I am bringing this mentorship program in this article because that’s how I started my entrepreneurial journey.

Below are some learnings that I found that is required for you to setup a successful business:

#1 Discover Your Passion

This is one thing and only thing I learned in my mentorship program and I am grateful for the teacher to help me find what I love and can be monetised. There is a difference between interest and passion, when you love to do something but cannot monetise, then its an interest and you should not focus on building a business around it, but if you love to do something and can be monetised, that’s what you call building a business around your passsion.

The 1st step to success is to discover what sets you on fire every time you are encountering it, you are so energised and excited to help others and you feel that you are in control while doing such activity, thats when you know that this is your passion. There is a framework that can be implemented to understand what is your passion, like I said, there is a difference between interest and passion.

Your life is a story and you need to understand what learnings from your life you can give to others and monetise it as well. You need to evaluate your skills, your expertise and where you are confortable talking for 3 straight days without thinking about the content. That is your passion, and that is where you should focus on building your business.

If you already have a business and you need to scale it, understand what your clients need and not what you want to give to your clients, your product and services should be designed in such a way that it should feel that it is made for your customer.

Remember customer always wants results and outcomes, it does not matter what you are trying to sell them, so understand this fundamental and build a product and services.

The formula you can use is

Your Passion + Customer’s Expected Results = Your Product/Your Services

One thing you will always have to remember unless you feel that “I Love doing this”, even if you don’t get paid, is the right passion for you to build your business.

#2 Market Research

If you really want to be successful building your business, you need to start planning about researching the market about your competitors, their services, their offers, and the most important is their Positioning in the market.

Remember, you cannot be the “Me Too” in the market, you should always plan to position yourself as “Me Only” in the market, and for that, you will have to do extensive research.

To build your strong positioning you need to focus on building the Mission and Vision of your business, and it’s not as simple as it sounds, you need to spend a lot of time researching the long-term vision and create the mission to achieve the vision and then to achieve the mission you need to create short term goals.

Let me explain what each terminology means.

Vision – Vision is a view of what the world should be after implementing your solution

Mission – Is to achieve/Reach a certain number of individuals, in a certain amount of time, providing value to them in a certain period without spending money/time in achieving your results.

Goals – Are short term goals and long term goals that will help you achieve your mission and in turn help you achieve your vision.

Once you design your Vision, Mission and Goals, then you can start evaluating the market, your audience, remember your passion has an audience and you need to find the right audience to make maximum impact on your business growth.

Understanding your market is understanding your business future, you need to spend a lot of time researching how your audience is behaving on the internet, where are they spending most of their time, what time they are online and what sites they spend time online. These insights will give you the right platform where you can study your audience.

Remember, every business is started with a question “Why I am doing this” and “Who needs my services and offer?” and then “What is my offer that people will run behind you to buy your services”.

If you really want to grow your business research your audience, their behaviour pattern and their buying pattern, and you will achieve success faster.

You can start using “Facebook Audience Insights” to start your research and there are many other websites that can provide you details of where you need to do research. You can also use the Reddit platform for your research which provides great information about your competitors, and problems people experience and are looking for solution online. Yon can gather these information to match with your skills and passion and start building a framework that will help building your business.

#3 Branding and Identity

Your passion deserves a brand as unique as you are. You need to position yourself in the market as someone who is the only one who can provide the ultimate solution to the problems people are experiencing. Your passion needs a Voice, a look and ultimately a brand. Let me give you an example, when people talk about toothpaste, which brand comes to your mind… I am sure “Colgate”, there are so many brands that sell toothpaste, Colgate stands out in the market because they have voiced in such a way that everyone knows it. Let’s see another example, when we talk about chocolate, which brand comes to your mind… again I am sure it is “Cadbury”, they have made themselves so visible that the name itself is enough.

Similarly, it would help if you market yourself so that your name becomes a brand. You should focus on making your name your brand identity, not your framework or business idea.

Let’s see what you need to do in order to brand yourself correctly. Branding is not just your logo or your framework name, it’s the soul of your business, so you need to focus more on branding yourself and it should be well-designed and executed.

Here are some things you need to consider.

1. Your Logo – Your business must have a logo that represents your vision and mission or your name.

2. Your Website. – You should have a website that talks about you, your business and your vision and mission.

3. Your Color Pallate – You must have a brand colour designed for your business, this is important because your every creative will follow that brand colour. Creatives like Social Media Posts, Website Color Pallate, Brouchers, PowerPoint Presentation Templates, Your Program Artefacts, etc.

4. Your Social Media Platforms – Your social media platforms need to be designed and configured in such a way that they speak for themselves about your brand and business. People first visit your social media profile to check what are you doing, what is your business about, how many people you have helped, etc. It’s a similar mentality of checking out reviews before buying anything from Amazon.com

5. Your Positioning – You need to make sure you position yourself in the market as someone who is providing the value that no one else is providing. It does not matter that there are others who are providing similar services, but you need to position yourself as “Me only” in the market and not “Me too”. You need to do this exercise in order to define yourself and come up with the Tag line that you will always use and it should always start with “India’s 1st..” For example “India’s 1st Career Facelift Mentor”, now there might be many who are working on career counselling and enhancement, but if you do your research and identify that there is no one who is positioning themselves as India’s 1st career face-life mentor, go ahead and market yourself as one.

#4 Product Development

To stand out in the market you need the best product (as per your understanding) and that should at least solve one problem that your potential customer is experiencing. For the start you dont even need a product, you just need that framework that you will talk about unless you get your 1st client. Your first approach is to validate your product, do a POC with your friends and relatives, get their feedback and keep refining your process and framework. Once you are satisfied with the output of the framework or your product, then start talking about it in your social media posts.

Many of the businesses started like this, where they did not even had a product but they sold so many tickets for their program and services and later they started building the product. This works because there is nothing to loose. If you already build a product and you start selling it, it adds a lot of frustration and depression in your life that bring you down and expose you to your lows.

So its a good idea to talk about your product, get a POC done with your friends and family and once there is a tangible output, get your potential clients on-boarded.

You can design your product portfolio in such a way that there should be products that falls in each category such as:

1. Free Of cost – These products could be something like an E-book, brochuer, Keynote speech, Youtube Videos, Write-ups, Articles etc.

2. Affordable – This is where you charge very basic fee to give value to others Such as Book, 1:1 Consultation, Recorded courses, Webinars etc .

3. Mid Level Program/Products – This is where your actual plan to earn starts, you need to create content for minimum 1 – 3 days Workshop content and start giving value to others and bring them in your community.

4. Hight ticket – This is your premium product where your entire focus should be in long run. You will not get your potential client directly for your high tickets, and even if you get them ask them to come through your sales process that is from your Webinar – Workshop – Mentorship (High Ticket).

Understand this, you will not able to create a block buster product right at the start, so keep working on your products, get feedback from the customers/friends/family members and keep refining your product towards a mature product.

#5 Funding and Investment

In order to turn your passion into a successful business, you need a great idea, a lot of efforts and yes, you need funds to invest in your business that it grows faster. Remember without Investment there is no returns. If someone is saying that you build your business without any investment, then they are fooling you to make their business grow. Keep this in mind.

If you passion is a vehicle that will take you from your current state to your future state, it needs fuel to move ahead and this fuel is your investment. Let me tell you where all you will need to spend in your entrepreneurship journey:

1. Invest in Mentorship :- If you are starting a fresh, you need someone who has already gone through the ups and downs of the journey of an entrepreneur. Find the right mentor who will guide you through the journey of your entrepreneurship. This is important because you will get stuck at some point and if you don’t have anyone to guide you, thats where you lose your hope and there are more chances for you to get into swamps that will disconnect you from your passion. You as a human will have this emotional challenge where you find no one to help you and thats where your mentor comes in picture. Don’t go behind the showbiz mentors who just showcase everything but gives you nothing. Find a genuine mentor, it can be anyone, your friend who is already into a set business, your colleague who started their business and now successful in their business, there are many known (Showbiz) mentors who charge you well to get your results on fast track, these mentors will charge you because they have created a framework that will help you fast track your growth process, so its good to invest in such mentorship program until you understand the nitty-gritty of setting up a business. Get one for you !!!

2. Invest in Tools :- You must identify what tools you would need to make sure you have your business running with the pace of the technology evolution. Now with the AI booming the industry, there are many AI-driven approach that can be implemented in your business to make your life easy in your journey of setting a business, but its not necessary to have everything paid version of tools right from the start, use free tools that can help you build your process and workflow with limitation. Remember, free tools will always have limitation and once you feel that you need more and you need to scale based on your business needs, then you can plan to invest in these tools. I have seen many people investing in the tool right from the start, where they even don’t know how to use it and waste money in the subscription of that tool and later regret. My recommendation is to try to find out free tools that you can use to at least kick start your business and invest as and when you feel you need to scale. If you need help with setting up your initial tools requirement, comment below and I will reach out to you as I have near about 250 tools that I have tried and tested and used some of them to make my life easy 🙂

3. Invest in Team :- You need a team, not at the start, but yes you need to plan your team well in advance. Once you see there is income generated by your passion, you need a helping hand, and your team can become your biggest asset to grow your business. I started working on my task on my own when I started helping others, video editing, social media posts, blogs (I write my blogs still :)) , etc, but I now I have delegated most of the task to others, so that I can focus on research and processes. To build you team you need to plan how much your team will cost you in terms of your monthly budget. My recommendation is to look for interns, they are little less costly and dedicated as they also want to learn with you. If you want to know how to hire the right team, comment below and I will reach out to you to with the details on how I found my team members.

4. Invest in Branding:- Your personal brand is everything, unless you have positioned yourself as a brand your success is limited. The moment you brand yourself as an entrepreneur or service provider people will start reaching out to you and thats how you build your community/followers and generate potential leads. Now, you will ask how will I build my brand, so here are few tips that you can implement:

1. Get your Website – Build you personal banding website where you talk about what is your mission, vision and purpose of life. How you are committed to help others and how you can transform their life with the product or service you have to offer

2. Social Proofs – If you have made any impact in anyone’s life, get their feedback (Video preferably) and start posting them on social media, add it to your website as social proof. Social proof adds a lot of value and credibility to your personal brand.

Get ready to invest to earn more.. There are many aspects you need to invest that I cannot explain here al, if you need any help with understanding where to invest and when to invest, comment below or reach out to me by visiting my website www.ajinkyapatale.com

My Recommendation

If you want to be a great business person, I recommend read following books that will help you build a strong profile.

The Lean Startup – RIES ERIC – You can buy it here – https://amzn.to/3SqakTe
The 10 X Rule – Grant Cardone – You can buy it here – https://amzn.to/3u28rD5

Conclusion

If you have that fire to start your own business and want to get to that freedom of life, then start implementing the above steps, and you will build your dream life.

If you need any help reach out to me by commenting below or send me an email on invincibleyou.ajinkya@gmail.com