Tips for starting a business in the new year

A happy new year could mean a happy new business. Make it one to remember by ensuring you thrive in future years. To build a successful company for success, aim for the best start. If you set yourself up well, you can more easily grow. Setting up a new business isn’t easy, but you can make it manageable by being prepared.

This guide will discuss tips for starting a business in the new year, including finding the right:

• Mindset
• Idea
• Market
• Goals

The first hurdle to start a new business is having the right mindset. A new company isn’t just for the New Year. It’s a significant commitment, often requiring more time than if you work for someone else. Your business will need constant attention in the early stages.

Such a demanding task may affect your mental health. For example, you could have the stress of fulfilling orders or the anxiety of paying off a loan. There are ways to overcome these effects, like using meditation services offered by Headspace or Calm. 

According to the Mental Health Foundation, regular exercise is likely to decrease stress, anxiety and depression. By incorporating a moment to meditate and time to work out, you could improve your ability to cope with negative emotions.

Staying motivated is also a crucial factor in having the right mindset. It may be easy to motivate yourself before you begin, but it might become more complex once the routine starts. Try surrounding yourself with cheerful family and friends to help with your motivation. 

If others are motivated to achieve things in their own lives, you will find it easier to do the same in your business. So, look for mentors to offer advice. A great place to do this is Linkedin, a social media platform that makes professionals easily contactable. Someone will likely provide some guidance if you reach out to enough people (perhaps entrepreneurs who have done something similar).

Before starting your new business, another critical thing to consider is your idea. You need to ensure that you are passionate about it (to keep you motivated) and that it will excite customers. The best way to do that is by searching for a problem that needs fixing.

If you can find something that people need and don’t yet have, you are onto a winning idea. It can be something that can help everyone or a smaller group of specific people. But it should be something that enough people can relate to, for you to create a stream of customers and earn a profit. Your products or services will need to stand out from anything similar. So it would help if you considered your unique selling point (USP).

A unique selling point means that your product or service offers an unusual and effective solution. If it is not the product or service itself, maybe it’s the unique experience that you provide. If you know what your core point will be, it will make marketing easier. You’ll sell what you offer based on the fundamental strength, hopefully giving customers enough reason to buy it. 

Without a USP, more prominent companies can charge less than you to steal customers. Large companies benefit from spreading costs per unit over a more significant margin through mass production and bulk buying.

Another crucial tip to consider when starting your business is to conduct market research. Your two main targets would likely be, to find information on potential customers and likely competitors. Both will depend on the product or service you offer, but research is helpful for even the most obvious ideas. 

For example, if you sell children’s football boots, you may think your competitors are other sportswear providers. Still, by researching, you may find that you will compete for their time with video game companies too.

You can use various methods to research competitors to directly test a physical product against your own, purchase one, and compare the style and quality. This method is benchmarking, and it helps you make sure you offer the best thing on the market. Learn what marketing channels and messages competition uses by checking their social media or websites.

It’s also helpful to learn about the audience to target. Speak to the public through interviews and surveys, to directly ask if they would buy the product or service. You can take these things further by putting on focus groups involving different people to discuss their opinions. Another way to research your customers is through observation. By providing your product or competitors, you can watch how they interact with it.

Having the right goals for your business from the beginning is a way of directing everything in the right direction. If you have something to work towards, use plans to achieve those aims. At an early stage, it may seem like a lot needs to happen quickly at an early stage. This pressure can soon become overwhelming, affecting achieving any goals productively. 

By setting out strategies, you can put together short, medium and long term business goals. For example, a short term goal may be to increase the Instagram following of the business by 500 in two months. Your strategy could then focus on achieving that and plan marketing campaigns on that platform. Having information on the competition and your audience might make coming up with techniques more simple. 

It could also be helpful to make sure that your goals are measurable. If you have numbers to check against, you will know whether you achieved them. It’s crucial for you always to be able to pinpoint your progress. You can change your strategies if things aren’t going the right way. These measurable goals should also have timeframes to achieve them to ensure that you meet essential targets when needed.

Checking your progress routinely for any business is helpful to continue with growth. Still, you need to be constantly aware of your finances. That’s why Countingup makes them accessible and easy to check daily.

Countingup is the business current account that keeps your company’s money separate, but it also has built-in accounting software. Through the Countingup app, you can receive cash flow insights to see what’s going in and out. This feature is helpful to make sure that you can afford to move forward with any plans over the year.

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