When you first graduate from school and begin your career, you have a lot of hopes and aspirations. There’s a yearning for meaningful work, for mentoring from a good boss and for a job that’s both challenging and rewarding too. You’re looking to build up your skills and gain valuable experience so you can quickly move up the corporate ladder and make your way in the world.
Then, over time, you come to realize that your daily work in a corporation isn’t enriching you at all. Somehow, the daily grind is just that, a time of nose to the grindstone drudgery. It’s during those moments that the dream of starting your own business starts to arise. There’s excitement at the prospect of creating your own venture and coming up with something that is uniquely yours in the world. It’s time to say goodbye to the bosses and to begin to follow your own dreams.
Defining Your Market Niche
If you are serious about starting a successful business, one of the first things you will want to do is to define your market niche. While it is tempting to want to be a generalist who appeals to a wide-range of paying customers, you’ll quickly find in business that the real money comes when you have focus and a well-defined market niche.
By niching down you help assure that you can precisely target potential prospects and that you have a unique mix of products and services to meet their needs. Once you have defined your niche, you’ll find that everything begins to flow and you’ll be able to develop precise marketing copy and a sales approach that works for attracting just the right customers.
Protecting Yourself and Your Money
As a business owner, you need to make key decisions that protect your investment in your new venture and your own personal financial assets too. One of the best ways to insulate yourself from what might go on in the company is to incorporate your venture. By forming a corporation, you can shelter your personal assets from any unforeseen financial downturns that might affect your business.
It’s also really important to make sure that you have the appropriate commercial insurance policies in place. As an owner you are responsible for risk and liability across your company. You’ll want to make sure that you have commercial automobile insurance for any vehicle used in your business and commercial property insurance to protect your assets. You should also have liability coverage to cover any personal injury or property damage claims and full worker’s compensation policies as required by the state.
Knowing How You’ll Get Your Customers
You may have a great market niche and appealing products and services, but if you don’t know how you will get your customers you don’t have a business at all. Customer acquisition is central to the success of your venture and coming up with great ways to attract and retain new clients is the heart of what makes your business succeed and grow.
One of the best ways to attract customers is through referral selling. Let’s say you use a national vendor’s software or products as a key part of your offering to the market. You can leverage their national presence and drawing power and become a trusted partner of theirs. Spend time cultivating relationships at their headquarters and network with any of their local sales representatives. Then, they’ll refer local customers to you because they know you can provide the personal attention and solutions some of their prospects need.
If you want to create a successful business and be your own boss in life, be sure to take the steps necessary to put the right foundation in place. By defining your market niche, developing a great way to source customers and protecting your financial interests you will be well on your way to making your dream come true.