How to Start Business |10 Simple Steps

Setting up a company might be anyone’s dream, however, it isn’t a cakewalk to start a business in India. One who wishes to set up his own company has to have a strong desire and unique thought process. Setting up a business involves various steps and procedures so that one will be able to forecast his business success.

There are plenty of opportunities available in India for small and medium types of businesses whether it comes to service or manufacturing or marketing of goods.

Despite various opportunities and resources available in India, we need to have sufficient knowledge to utilise every resource properly.

In this guide, we will discuss the step by step process on how to start a business. In fact, these steps can be considered as a prerequisite as well whenever anyone is planning to start a business.

How to start business in India

Step 1: Research Your Business Idea:

If you already have a unique, mind-blowing, innovative business idea, it’s okay. Now it’s time to cross-check your business ideas whether it will actually work or not.

Hence make a list of 100 people or less depending upon how deep and accurate you want to evaluate your ideas, approach them by phone or personal meeting and do a proper survey regarding your product or services which you are planning to introduce. Note that don’t disclose your business ideas to anyone otherwise they might discourage you. 

Collect everyone’s feedback, study the data carefully and draw a conclusion. This process will boost your confidence exponentially and thus your first step has completed now.

Your self-confidence will play a crucial role in your entrepreneurial journey especially in unfavourable circumstances.

Step 2: Analyse Market Competition:

The second step is to analyse market competition or competitors analysis in your territory. The more you research and gather information regarding your territory, competitors, consumer’s behaviour, price of products or services, the probability of success is higher.

There are various factors when it comes to competitors analysis and customer behaviour. Conduct a survey on the basis of following steps and questions.

  • Make list of top distributors and retailers in your territory 
  • How much (value) do they sell the products every month?
  • Which company’s products are leaders?
  • What are the prices of those products or services?
  •  Do the customers satisfy with the product?
  •  Can any improvement be done with the existing products or services?

Step 3: Plan your Products Specification:

The third important step is your would-be product specification as the product is the backbone of any company. If your products or services are superb, amazing and offer value to the customers, your 30% of work is done. 

Therefore based on the above survey you need to plan for designing and development of your products or services. Make sure your products must provide substantial value to end-users whether you planning to manufacture or outsource the products.

You should be thinking about why am I focusing more on product design and development. So the reason behind this is your product is going to become your company’ Identity in future if you want to build it to the next level. Always plan for at least 2 or 3 products initially as it provides flexibility to the user as well as your distribution partner.

Step 4: Plan the Source of Finance:

One out of every three businesses struggle because of the financial crisis, therefore, your financial budget is going to play a vital role in the entrepreneurial journey. You need to prepare a budget for at least two years. That means you need to arrange the funds for a minimum of two years meanwhile you don’t need to look for additional resources of finance.

In fact, this is my personal experience and opinion for every budding entrepreneur. Actually, I am not discouraging you, I’m just advising you. The reason behind it is that once you have initiated the company then you must focus only on promotion, advertisement, sales, expansion, add on new products and other significant affairs no arranging funds for at least two years if you want to succeed and expand operations of your company within the limited time frame.

Step 5: Get Your Legal Formalities Done:

Here I’ll not focus on legal formalities like registration of firms, GST, labour Act registration etc because my focus is on essential steps before starting any business to become a successful entrepreneur. Though depending upon your type and nature of the business, you need to register your company/ firms with the concerned authority.

For instance, for food and beverage related products you need to take a license from food and safety departments, for pharmaceutical-related products you need to take a license from the Drugs Authority of India.

Step 6: Build Your Experienced and enthusiastic Team:

Building the team is one of the significant steps when it comes to even think about business because you can’t perform every task on your own. You require the experienced and capable employees to drive your business as per your expectations.

You need to do lots of research before hiring an employee. If you hired the right employee for your organisation, this could be your first step towards success. Therefore, you must apply all your efforts to hire an employee.

You can delay your launching date of the company but you must hire the right, suitable and experienced employee because your team will decide the future of your business.

See also, How important is Staffing in Management?

Step 7: Plan the mode of Advertisement:

How important the advertisement is in today’s cut-throat competition? I don’t need to discuss with you. Being an entrepreneur you must be aware of competition these days. Does it worth whether you have a golden product in your portfolio if nobody knows it.

There are lots of ways to advertise your products but you need to pick a cost-effective and efficient mode of advertisement. These days digital advertisements like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Youtube Ads are the most popular platform for advertisement. 

On the other hand, other modes of advertisement like banner ads, local ads may also be useful depending on the nature and locale of the business.

How to start business

Step 8: Formulate your Final Product or design your Final services:

Based on various above steps finally formulate your products or services. There are two options either you manufacture by your own or outsource it from other reputed manufacturers. My suggestion is to outsource your planned products initially and by the time if you are able to sell up to the mark, you need to plan your own manufacturing unit.

If you outsource a product, it could be less profitable for your company but initially, you shouldn’t invest your majority of funds into the manufacturing of products because there are lots of other essential expenditures upon you to drive the company smoothly.

Step 9: Set up Pre-launch Strategy:

This is the most crucial step when it comes to start and launch your products or services. Before launching the company you need to formulate a unique strategy to gather the initial attention of consumers. This could provide an initial boost to your company as well as can generate initial customers for your company.

Pre-launch strategies work as an initial advertisement for the products which you are going to introduce. For instance, you can organize some events, get together, campaign or functions so that you can be familiar with your customers, retailers or distributors. 

In fact, setting up the pre-launch program would facilitate you to develop relationships with your would-be customers. You can also organise different customer relationship programmes to grab the attention of the potential customer. Though this will impose some extra burden to your finance, this will definitely add some value and will be beneficial for your company in future.

Step 10: Finally Launch the Company:

This is the final step of setting up a business. Fix the launching date of the company, prepare your team, guide each team member and implement all of your plans along with a positive approach.

Don’t forget planning anything on paper may be easy but when it comes to execution of your thoughts, there might be a lot of differences which you’re going to face in the real market.

Therefore, never get hopeless whenever anything is not going as per your expectation because it happens during the execution of planning, strategies, SOPs. You need to formulate and pick out the USPs of your products. Formulate detailing guidelines, presentation pitch etc and create an interesting story so that you might engage and grab your customer’s attention. 

Conclusion:

Hope this article might guide you regarding How to start a business? In a nutshell, starting any new business is not so easy but if you follow the proper steps carefully, it might be simple and easy to set up any business. Above 10 steps are very crucial phases of business and should not be avoided. 

You might also like.

How to start a business in India?

Steps to Generate a Business Idea

Importance of Planning in Business

Leave a Comment