19 Mar Starting a business
You want start a business? Then don’t undertake this path without first having a clear vision of the objectives you want to achieve and knowing the skills you have (or don’t have) in order to put all your ideas on paper.
When you choose to start a business, you have to use every moment of your spare time in an intelligent way, but you mustn’t be in a rush to get to the finish line, because often when you are in a hurry you miss fundamental steps.
What questions do you need to ask yourself before starting a business? The first question you need to ask yourself is: Why do I want to start a business? After answering this question, you can then take a notebook and begin to honestly answer each of these other questions:
• What skills do I have?
• What is my passion?
• What are my areas of expertise?
• How much can I afford to invest?
• How much capital do I need?
• What kind of lifestyle do I want to live?
• Am I ready to become an entrepreneur?
Obviously when answering all these questions you must be brutally honest with yourself.
Once answered, identify your business idea. First things first, to be able to identify your business idea you must think about your potential clients. You must think about satisfying a need, a necessity, a problem, a desire. Once you understand this, then you will surely be on your way to sharpening your business idea.
Remember that people always prefer to have stronger, more beautiful, more powerful and less defective ‘things’, so your business idea could also be an improvement on an existing product. Your business idea must also be inherent to the field in which you are competent. Another aspect that you can evaluate for a new business idea is a better approach to something pre- existing. For example, you can try to make a product faster, cheaper, or both, and create a better or more convincing offer.
And how do you find the resources?
There are many different ways to get the resources needed to start an activity. Sure, looking for an investor at the beginning may seem really difficult, but if your idea is good, then you will be able to convince someone to fund your idea.
• Self-financing: start your project gradually, using the money you earn from your work as an employee.
• Ask for financing, a personal loan or a business loan from a bank. In this case you will have to provide guarantees such as: proof of a permanent salary, a guarantor with a fixed salary, or a mortgage on a property.
• Look for financing through crowdfunding. To start a crowdfunding, you must propose an idea and set the budget you want to reach and, through this platform, users can choose to donate the amount they want to your project until your set budget is reached. This system is very popular online, where various crowdfunding platforms can be found.
• Access to European funding.
• Find a Financial Investor, that is a person who goes in search of interesting projects to be able to finance with his/her money, requesting a percentage return on the activities’ earnings.