Starting your own business is something that needs a lot of thought, planning, and strategy. What's going to set you apart? What makes your business unique? Who are your target customers? What are their current pain points and what is the need in the marketplace? What's your competitive advantage? 

These questions can help you get started in planning your business launch. As you think and plan for your new business, there are a few practical things you can do once you make the decision to start a new business. We’ll go through each of the steps briefly to give you a general overview of the steps needed to launch your business. As always, drop us a line here to talk in more detail about any or all of the following. 

Creating a Business Plan

First, you need to create a business plan. The process of creating a business plan for your new company will help you determine the market for your business, service, product, value offering, the amount of money you will need, the role of each founder of your company, and how you will execute on your idea. Taking the time to put your thoughts and strategy on paper will help guide you. It's also a great way to share your idea with potential customers and potential investors. There are so many free resources to help you develop a business plan including organizations like business mentoring from SCORE which offers free business plan workshops, as well as coaching and mentoring.  Additionally, the county and state you live in likely offers assistance in forming a business plan. 

Your business plan should consist of the following:

• Executive Summary.
• Business Description.
• Market Analysis.
• Organization and Management Structure.
• Sales Strategies.
• Funding.
• Financial Projections.

Brand Identity

Once you’ve taken the time to create a business plan, you want to determine your company or brand identity. This means understanding who you are and setting the culture, mission, vision, and values for hour new company. Even if you’re a one man shop, your mission, vision, and values will help you attract the right people to work for you and the right customers to your business. It may seem arbitrary at first, but this work on the front end will pay dividends down the road for you as you connect with customers. 

In addition to the brand identity work you want to take time defining your voice and tone especially in this age of social media. Defining how you will speak to your customers can set your business or brand apart from your competition. For example, if you are an outdoor gear e-trailer, you may want to define your voice and tone as adventurous and exploring. You may want to create a social media strategy that explores our National Parks system and offers reviews and recommendations for where to explore and must see spaces. Your website content should be designed and written in this way with your customer’s age, demographics, and interests in mind. More on this later.

Moving on to developing your tag line, value proposition and messaging. This will become really important work as we dive further into your marketing plan.This work will help distinguish your brand from the thousands of other voices and ads competing for your customer’s attention in a noisy and busy marketplace. 

Value Proposition & Tagline

Your tag line is a quick, catchy phrase that defines what your business is all about in a short, memorable way. Your value proposition defines what your business uniquely offers your clients and should provide compelling language for why your customer should consider doing business with you over your competitors. Typically, your value proposition should be front and center on your website and potentially the first thing customer sees on your website, after your logo and tagline.  Give this some thought, and even hire a company like ours to help package your message in a way that connects with your audience in a memorable way.

Messaging

Messaging is really how you speak to your customers and what message you want them to remember. You need to be creative and strategic here because your message should be repeated through various channels and in different ways. Remember it can take up to 7 times for a customer to remember who you are and give your ad or message a thought. The average person is seeing thousands of ads and messages a day, so what’s going to make you stand out? 

In terms of the branding work, the last step will is visual identity. Defining your company with a solid logo, typography, color, images, and photography is more important than ever. Investing in this work will set your company apart and distinguish you from your competitors in the marketplace. Hiring a branding company like L2 Digital on the front end will be an investment in your future success as you go to market. 

Business Formation & Structure

Next, you need to decide on the legal structure for your business. Are you going to be a sole proprietor, an LLC, a C-corp, S-corp, partnership, or otherwise. There are a number of things you want to consider in making this decision and consulting with an accountant and/or an attorney is something I would recommend. There are certain tax advantages to structures and different costs associated with the formation of each of the types of business formations. There are considerations for whether you are personally liable in your business as with a sole-proprietorship or if you are forming a corporation or LLC which protects the business owners from personal liability as in the case of a lawsuit, judgment, etc. In a corporation you can have multiple owners of the company, can issue private shares of your company to multiple stockholders or investors. LLCs require less paperwork and are typically easier to form, but there are ongoing costs to maintain and fees depending on your state. A corporation has even more requirements, including a board and certain meeting requirements throughout the year. 

Once you determine the right structure for the new business you want to file the correct paperwork and pay the correct fees.You may need to file for a business license in the county you will do business in. In certain jurisdictions including Los Angeles, you’re also required to issue the announcement publicly in general purpose newspapers. 

Competitive Payment Processing Rates

Next, you need to think about how will you receive payments from your customers? If you will be accepting credit cards, you will also need a merchant account to accept credit card payments. Here you have plenty of options as well. Depending on the volume of sales you expect to receive via credit card, will impact your decision in this area. If you’re planning to do $1,000 or under per month in credit card sales, a simple solution like Square will work. Once you get the volume of credit card sales, I recommend setting up an account with our processor of choice, CardConnect by Fiserv (formerly First Data). As an authorized partner with Fiserv, our company L2 Digital can offer you really aggressive rates, far surpassing companies like Square and saving you potentially hundreds of dollars per month. The other benefit to CardConnect is that you can take in-person payment for retail businesses through its direct integration with Clover hardware. You can also create invoices for services and virtual businesses, and last but certainly not least, CardConnect integrates to provide leading e-commerce solutions for direct payment on your website so you can scale and grow your business online.

Creating a Marketing Plan

Once you determine how you will take payments, and obtain the most competitive credit card processing rates possible, you need to invest the time, energy, and possibly money if you hire an outside consultant in creating a marketing plan to acquire the customers to create the revenue that grows your business. In our last digital marketing trends post, we talked about the essential elements that every marketing plan needs. I recommend reading that post thoroughly and then taking time to focus on building out your marketing plan. Allocating the right resources to the right channels and developing the right messaging to reach your target market has never been more important. It's easier than ever to run ads for your business on digital channels which means there is also more competition and more messaging than ever competing for the time and attention of your potential customers. That's why getting this right is so important.

When you think of creating a marketing plan think of the following P words:

• Product
• Price
• Promotion
• Place
• People
• Process, and
• Physical evidence

Product - what's your offering.

Price - what are you going to charge.

Promotion - how will people hear about it.

Place - where will you offer your product or service.

People - who's on your team.

Process - how will you get your product into the hands of your customer? What's your internal process along with vendors needed to bring your product to your market.

Physical Evidence - what tangible benefit are people getting from your product or service?

Taking this further, you could break it down this way:

• Market Research - What's the opportunity and need you are filling/pain point you are addressing?
• Target Audience - Who needs what you offer?
• Market Strategies - How will you break in and effectively compete with other companies in your space?
• Goals & Success - Define what success is for you.
• Media - Where will you place your marketing dollars?
• Budget - how much are you going to allocate to marketing? We recommend 10-20% of sales/sales forecast for aggressive growth.
• Tracking - how will you know if your plan is successful? You need to set up conversion tracking and metrics to best optimize the money you are spending. 
• Content Plan & Calendar. Every business needs a plan to create and distribute content. It's what establishes your credibility.

Again in summary, focus on understanding your customers by creating detailed buyer personas, a SWOT and competitive analysis, budget, and strategy. This work will keep you focused on the right outcomes and focus for your business as you begin to invest your money in the right channels and strategies. Determine the best ways to reach out to your target customers and develop a budget for each part of your media mix.

Website Design

Now that you've finished your branding work, developed a marketing plan, and budget it's time to focus on the first impression and most important visual expression of your company - your website. Your website needs to be well designed with high-quality photography, excellent written copy, and a strong and clear call to action. Your website must format with an excellent visual appeal on mobile devices including Apple and Android smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Next,  quality content and help answer visitors’ FAQs. If you're an e-commerce company, invest in high-quality product photography and consider VR options to help bring your product to life. Investing the time and money into creating a well-designed, well-written, and great user interface website design will be an asset that can be used as the base to grow and scale your business. Your website is literally the first impression a potential client will have of your business, so taking the time upfront to create this is not something that should be done lightly. Take the time and invest in creating a quality website, it will pay your business back many times over. While we build many websites on Wordpress, we also use our own custom solution that delivers incredible speed, mobile friendly rendering, and easy editor for updates and SEO campaigns. 

Funding

There are a few different ways to consider for funding your new business. This should have been outlined in your business plan, but worth mentioning as it can be a make it or break it decision.

1) Bootstrap it. Bootstrap funding means you are out on the streets, knocking on doors, and selling your product or service to fund your business. Set a goal and don't come in until you meet it.

2) SBA. The SBA (Small Business Administration) offers programs to help entrepreneurs get started in their new business. The rates are usually more competitive, banks are more apt to lend since the loan is in part backed by the.

3) Investors. Depending on the type of business you have, an investor may be interested in partnering with you for a share of the ownership and earnings in your company.

Execution

All this work however could be in vain, if you don’t execute on your strategy, brand, identity, by providing an excellent customer experience and delivering on your brand promise to your customers. Executing on your strategy will build customer loyalty, positive reviews and word of mouth, and bring you more customers and build your business. 

Questions?

Let's talk more! Our company can help you with a number of these services and deliver you an excellent experience and launch of your new business.