10 WAYS TO BUILD A SUCCESSFUL NEW BUSINESS

With hundreds of markets and industries getting (or already) saturated, starting and building a successful new business is becoming increasingly more difficult. Most of the competition already have more customers, more funding, and more experience than you do. All these factors make cutting through a market and turning out successful, begin to seem a lot like science fiction.

How then can an entrepreneur build a successful new business? What does it take to raise a business from the ground-up to success?

Figuring out how to start a business in a new or crowded industry is crucial to your success as an entrepreneur. While building a successful business involves identifying a problem, having a good market penetration strategy, and heeding the business advice of mentors, several other steps or factors are largely overlooked.





Here Are 10 Ways To Build A Successful New Business:

1). Create A Long Term Plan:

At any stage of a business’s existence, it’s mandatory that its operations are run through a plan. The plan could be a short term or long term plan. While short term planning is crucial for your daily and weekly targets, long range planning will ensure you’re moving towards the big picture.

Planning keeps you organised and focused. It let’s you know when you’ve steered off your goal, when you’re not meeting your targets, and also how to respond to unexpected events. Without a plan, your business is like a light object been blown by the wind in any direction.

Work with a plan to ensure you reach your goals on time.


2). Sell What People Want To Buy:

Consumers don’t care about what you like. They only care about what can solve their needs, and solve it darn well. Before you invest a dime in a product or service, it’s important you do a comprehensive market research on it’s potential viability. This could include offering free products, studying how much people are willing to pay for what you’re offering, and if anyone cares at all about having that problem solved.

What you want to sell doesn’t count. If people don’t want to buy that, it’s a wrong investment. Only offer the market, what the market wants.

Remember, always offer what people want to buy, not just what you want to sell.


3). Keep Your Expenses At The Lowest Minimum:

Uncontrolled expenses have ruined many companies that raised over $100 million dollars in venture capital funding. Imagine what it would do to a small business.

It’s crucial that as an entrepreneur starting a new business or running an existing business, you should constantly be looking out for newer and more creative ways to keep costs at the lowest minimum.

If you cannot figure out how to keep your expenses very low, it’s a matter of time before you cease to be a business owner.



4). Focus On Sales And Marketing:

Customer acquisition and retention are the lifeblood of your small business. Acquiring and retaining enough customers is important for you to break even else, your business would fold-up.

Customers are like oxygen for any business. At the start of your new business, you have to do everything to acquire as many customers as possible. This acquisition must be backed with a goal to drive your sales high.

If you’re having problems closing any sales even when your product or service is something the market already wants, you could take a weekend sales training class or employ the services of a marketing agency, while you put the other parts of your business together. If your business is largely based online, you could use creative email marketing techniques to drive consumers to your website.

Sales and marketing if executed right, will save your business from going down a tunnel.


5). Underestimate Your Revenues And Overestimate Your Expenses:

After drawing up what you’d love to call the best financial plan, the numbers still never stick. What you write on paper is different from what happens in real life.

When you’re drawing up a financial plan, always underestimate your revenues and overestimate your expenses. The reason is your expenses would mostly be higher than whatever you’ve planned, and your revenues may be far lower than what you expected.

Altering your financial plan this way keeps you in a safe zone. It ensures that no matter how bad the expenses or revenues get, your emotional state would still be balanced enough to make sound decisions. It also ensures that achieving your target number becomes more realistic.

To avoid disappointments and always stay on track, whenever you’re planning, always underestimate your revenues and overestimate your expenses.


6). Add Exceptional Value:

“Tell me, and I’ll forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I’ll understand”. This statement has carried heavy weights since it first surfaced, and it’s almost, always, absolutely true!

People will never forget the way you make them feel. By building personal relationships and showing them your brand is adding true value to their lives, they’d keep coming back to you.

Make as many customers as possible feel like family. When they want to get those products or services again, they’d come running your way.


7). Get Cashflow Immediately:

As soon as your business takes off, it’s important you do everything in your power to get cash flowing in as soon as possible.

Cashflow will power your business. It means your business is heading somewhere, and that your model is accepted by a certain number of people because, they’re willing to part with their cash. If you cannot achieve cashflow in your business, no matter how creative or smart your marketing strategies are, your products or services are not fit for the market.

One way you can achieve cashflow soon is to ask for deposits before you deliver a service. This way, you know your business has started to generate some revenue.

Get cash flowing in as soon as possible.


8). Do Everything Possible To Increase Your Profits:

The goal of every business isn’t just to create great products and add value to consumers lives, but also to become highly profitable entities.

As you run your business, you need to focus heavily on turning more prospects into customers, getting sales leads, increasing the return rate of your customers, and also increasing your profits exponentially without doing any harm to your customers finances.

As you strive to achieve profitability, you must also focus on driving down your expenses. The lower your expenses go, the higher your profit margins rise, and the more successful your new business would tend to be.


9). Test A Lot:

As you run your business, you must test and measure every single move you make. This will help you know what strategies are working, what aren’t, where you can make improvements, and what you should focus more on.

Testing gives you deep data on everything about your business. These data if manipulated right can be used to determine a lot.

A company in the United States that uses data to perfection is the retail giant, Target. By manipulating their customer data, they were able to determine which customers are pregnant and which aren’t, without seeing any medical pregnancy test results.

Collect as much data as you can. Some information you can collect are:

Customers names.
Dates of birth.
Time of purchase.
Time spent on each category.
Returned items.
Highest selling items.
Seasonal selling items.
And a lot more.

By collecting data, you can adequately test your model and measure everything that occurs in your business. The result from these tests will help you make better decisions, which would subsequently increase your customer acquisition and retention rate.

When you test and measure everything, you save yourself both wasted time, and wasted money.


10). Get A Mentor:

Find someone who’s successful in the field or related field you choose to start a new business in, and make that person a mentor.

What a mentor offers you is a wealth of experience, which would not only save you time, but would also save you a lot of money.

With a mentor(s) watching your business from a non-emotional stance, they can easily tell you what you’re doing right or wrong, and be blunt about it. These candid business advice will always ensure you retrace your steps anytime you’ve fallen off your route.