Start

Have you started your business but need some help and support to keep you on the right track?

Britain is a nation of entrepreneurs. At the start of 2018 there were 5.6m businesses in the UK, and 99.9% of these were SME’s and small businesses. According to FSB (Federation of Self Employed & Small Businesses), the combined annual turnover of SME’s was £2.0 trillion, 52% of all private sector turnover.

One thing for certain is that in order to grow a successful business you will need to invest a lot of time and energy and seek plenty of free expert advice.

In the majority of cases, developing a start-up idea is all about understanding the different key components involved, such as creating a business plan, sourcing finance, having the relevant legal paperwork, choosing mentors, recruiting people, understanding customer demands, sourcing technology, as well as a whole lot more.

To help this process, we have a checklist to make sure your thinking and your business plan are on the right track:

1. Offer a solution to a problem

As long as consumers have problems, they will always search for solutions. Fortunately for entrepreneurs, there are still lots of rooms for improvements in existing products and services.

2. Identify sources of funding

From the day you start building your business until the point where you can make a consistent profit, you need to finance your operation with start-up capital. Some founders choose to self finance their business, many founders need external start-up capital to get their business off the ground. There are a variety of options available to small business owners, from seed financing, crowdfunding to business loans.

3. Review your business goals at least once a year

Update your business plan at least once a year.

Talk to your customers and potential customers
Try to come up with a new market segmentation
Look at the larger potential market for the problems that need solutions.

4. When planning, always overestimate expenses and underestimate revenues.

Being conservative in your numbers doesn’t mean you are willing to accept those numbers, it just means you are arming yourself with information you can work with.

5. Focus on sales and marketing fanatically.

In business, nothing happens until a sale is made. Find good ways to get leads, convert leads into sales and make sure you keep getting repeat sales from your customers. Too many entrepreneurs focus on getting their brand right before they start to generate leads. That is exactly the wrong way to go about business. Leads are always more important than your brand, so don’t waste money getting your brand right at the expense of spending that same money to find new customers.

6. Network

Don’t underestimate the benefits of networking; meeting new people, they could be potential partners, advisors, mentors or cutomers.

7. Test and measure everything.

You can’t change what you don’t measure, and you can’t tell if a program or strategy is working if you are not faithfully testing, measuring and tracking your results.

8. Determine your business legal structure

The 4 most common business structures are:

Sole trader – a sole trader is a business that’s owned and run by one person, where the government makes no legal distinction between the person who owns the business and the business itself.
Partnership – a partnership is a single business where 2 or more people share joint ownership and each owner contributes to all aspects of the business as well as shares in the profits and losses of the business.
Private Limited Company – A private limited company is a type of legal structure, in which the liability of each shareholder is limited to their individual investment – this is known as limited liability. Limited companies are governed by the rules and regulations contained in the Companies Act 2006, and all company registration and records are managed by Companies House.
Public Limited Company (PLC) – A PLC is a company with shares traded on public markets (the FTSE 500, NASDAQ etc). Often a private company limited by share will go public once it reaches a certain size, and the company’s shareholders will be able to offer their shares for sale to the public.

9. Don’t discount, add value.

Whenever you discount, you are taking money directly out of your pocket and directly from your bottom-line profit. So don’t do it. Instead, create added value propositions all the way up and down your product or service line. Whatever the industry is, look to hold your price points, increase your margins with the low-cost or no-cost extras. In the end, those little things won’t cost you a lot, but will build up goodwill with your customers and customer base.

10. Identify mentors in your industry

Even if you don’t get a business mentor at first to help you and guide you in your planning and operation, get someone who is objective and outside of your business you can rely on for nitty-gritty business advice and to hold you accountable to getting results. Too often, we think we have all the answers and are the only people who can really get things done. The reality is that another set of eyes can work wonders for how you operate both on and in your business.

This is just an initial checklist which we hope will be valuable in helping you clarify your thinking and help you to prioritize some activities in your start-up planning.

One of our philosophies is there are no mysteries in business or in life; there’s just information you don’t know yet.

By joining SPARK, you will be inducted into a community of likeminded individuals. We know you will need time to develop your business, so we provide a variety of space options and business support to help cut the time it will take you to successfully get to your ultimate destination – wherever that may be for you and your business.

Whether you are a sole trader or a part of a team or thinking of setting up for the first time – SPARK team and its partners will support you in taking the next steps in business.

As a resident member of SPARK, you will have access to business tailored workshops, and training. You will have the opportunity to attend workshops covering start-up finance, marketing, employment and investment. You will be actively encouraged to attend clinics run by our partners such as the Growth Hub, Black Country Chamber of Commerce, Business Solutions, and others, and where appropriate encouraged to participate in showcasing opportunities and investment days.

You will be provided with access to our mentors, advisors and support services, which can help you to build a robust action plan and accelerate the development of your idea or business into a commercial enterprise.

Crucially you will also be introduced to your fellow SPARKIES!

SPARK will provide you with as many opportunities as we can but it’s up to you to take them and capitalise on them. SPARK’s goal is to help you grow your business as our mission is to retain creative and tech talent in the local area thus attracting investment to the Black Country, Staffordshire and The Marches.

For the different memberships of SPARK please click here.