Business
Make Your Business Idea a Reality by Following a Few Simple Steps By Mike Kappel, AllBusiness.com contributor
AS THE VERY SUCCESSFUL WALT DISNEY once said, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” And as a successful entrepreneur myself, I can confirm that you can make your dreams come true if you set your mind to it, persevere, and give it all you got. But, making your business idea a reality doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, patience, and a ton of hard work. So, how do you make your business idea and dream come to life? Let me walk you through it. Got a solid idea for a product or service? Awesome. Now it’s time to get going and make your idea a reality. But in order to do that, you have to be willing to put in some legwork. To get your idea off the ground and help your business dream come true, start with these seven steps:
Conduct a market analysis Create customer personas Analyze competitors Look for trends Conduct surveys Collect demographic data Consider psychographics (e.g., values, hobbies, etc.) You can’t try to sell your service or product to everyone under the sun. It’s not realistic because 1. Do your research not everyone is going to have a want or need for When trying to bring your business idea to life, what you’re planning on offering. Also, people have start by doing some research. Look at: different pain points. So, find your ideal customer The market who would want to buy from you and narrow down Potential competitors your audience as much as possible. Your audience After you get a good idea of whom you want to Your product or service won’t get off the ground target, it will become easier and easier to determine if there isn’t a viable market for it. So, take some next steps, such as marketing strategies. time to really dig in, research, and find out if your idea is sound. To help with this process, consider 3. Establish a financial game plan Unless you’ve found a way to grow money also doing a SWOT analysis to analyze strengths, on trees, chances are you’ll need some type of weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to your funding to support your entrepreneurial dream. In business idea. fact, less than half (48%) of small businesses have 2. Narrow down your target audience their financing needs met. To make your dreams I mentioned your audience earlier, and I’m going come true and get the funding you need, establish to mention it again. Why? Because pinpointing the a financial game plan. right target audience for your startup can make or Before you can set your dream in motion, you break your business’s success. So if you want your need to have a good idea on how you plan to idea to work, narrow down your target audience. finance said dream. Luckily, owners have a lot of To find the ideal audience for your idea, you can: 10
November-December 2021
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