Use our step by step guide to help you on your way
You may be an experienced serial Entrepreneur, or simply someone has has a great idea, and the vision and passion to want to create something awesome.
Whoever you are, you may find this guide useful to help you, or just refresh your knowledge at this most exciting of times.
The washing machine in your stomach right now, it’s excitement, anticipation, trepidation and maybe a little fear, but definitely excitement. Harness it, know that what you are about to do is brave and puts you in control of your destiny. Many have walked in your shoes and felt the same way, and the majority will not put themselves in this place that you are now in, even if they have a good idea, or outstanding skills, for fear of stepping out of the comfort zone. Feel the fear and do it anyway, if you plan properly, be diligent, take some risks and work hard, you can only succeed.
Step 1
Research, Research and then Research more
Having an idea for a business is exciting, it may be something that no one else has thought of, or simply that you want to follow your dreams. It doesn’t always have to be a new idea, think of all the Coffee Shops in your town, who would think there would be room for another? Or consider Fever Tree, in 2005 Tim Warrillow and Charles Rolls launched Fever Tree as a premium tonic water brand. Who would have dreamt of going up against Schweppes, the leading mixer brand, with global significant market share. These guys did and it is now a multi billion £ business. They alone are worth many millions. So do not be afraid to go for it, or be embarrassed to take it further through fear of failure. But do your research diligently, and understand what the market opportunities are, and how your business can thrive and survive.
Step 2
Create your business plan
At these early stages it can be comprehensive or high level. It depends on your business idea and the complexity.
You should consider basic things like:
- Who will I sell to?
- Are you going to sell to business (B2B) or consumers (B2C)?
- Will you target any specific type of customer? (in B2B it could be healthcare, or Education, in B2C your demographic could be 20-35 year old professional women)
- What do I need to do in order to make profit?
- This may be obvious but often overlooked, especially when you are creating a business that you are passionate about. Never forget that unless you are a ‘Not for Profit’, that you are in business to make profit!
- How will I market my business?
- If you are local, you will likely use, printed media as well as online and social presence relevant to your area For more national or International businesses online and social will be the way to go. But choose relevant and specific sites, and content. Know who you are targeting and why, and understand your budget. You could engage with a professional organisation or free lancer to help, or use sites like LinkedIn for training and guidance initially.
- How will I fund the business in the early days?
- There are many routes for this such as:
- A business bank startup loan is of course a popular choice, and reasonably straightforward. However go in to the eyes wide open, Bank loans are not guaranteed to be approved, and they need paying back (with interest).
- Private backers can be great of you can find one, you may have family who want to support you by providing a loan or for some share capital. In any case if they want to support you that’s great, just make sure that all parties know the risks, and get it documented in good old black and white. You do not need any ambiguity in business, ‘especially when dealing with friends or family’. Do not assume that it will always be butterfly’s and roses! Get it documented.
- Crowdfunding has become extremely popular (read more on our glossary page). This is a method whereby you can get relatively small investments, from large amounts of people. This spreads the risk to the investors, and gets you the money you so desperately need, in relatively quick time. Some investors want shareholding (but will expect an exit sale within 3-5 years maximum), others will expect interest returned on their investment. You could setup a crowdfunding page yourself using facebook or a similar platform, or alternatively there are crowdfunding brokers who can do the hard work for you. They will also have regular investors to approach on your behalf, significantly speeding up the process. (Brokers will of course want to charge for the service, so check the fine-print). Also if you are thinking of the Investor route get some advice on Tax Investment schemes supported by the Government. EIS and SEIS are popular, but you do need to meet specific qualifying criteria, including registering for the scheme within a set timescale.
- There are many routes for this such as:
- Who will I sell to?
Whichever route you choose to obtain funding, consider the risks, and the reward. Rarely will people risk and lend money for a new business venture, without wanting something back.
- Consider your competition and do a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats)
- Who are they?
- What do they do well?
- What would you do better?
- Consider your competition and do a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats)
Step 3
Think of a name (this is will be your brand)
The name can be vitally important, it should be a primary sales and marketing element to your brand. Your target market is also vital to consider here, if aiming at B2B does the name represent the professionalism that you want to portray. If a high street local Coffee Shop you may want to make it sound personal and name it after yourself. It is also sometimes good to consider potential ‘negative’ connotations as well as positive. By this I mean consider how it could be read in different contexts, ask friends, family or professionals to feedback on a selection of choices (market feedback is important, these people could represent your customer demographic). And finally try not to be too cryptic or clever, you want to create a strong brand and be memorable so that people can find you online, or easily refer you to friends and colleagues. There is lots of useful information on choosing a name on the Government website.
Other things to also consider when choosing a name;
- Check the rules on choosing a name
- Is it unique?
- Check on sites like Companies house to make sure that you will be able to register it. Use Companies House to check
- Check that you are not infringing Intellectual Property, Copyrights or trade marks by checking on the trade marks journal
- Check that a domain name is available (a domain name is the name that the Internet will use to identify your website and email addresses). We use 1&1 IONOS to check and register our domain names. Try to go for a clean domain name with and whichever domain type you use (.eu/.co/.co.uk/.info) also register the .com. The domain provider will offer you options if your domain is not available. Do not rush into an option as they may not identify your brand as effectively, however as a warning this should be a clear indicator that a similar named business exists. Try the IONOS domain checker for your name and you will see what I mean.
When you are brainstorming your company name, also consider other things, such as:
- How does it sound when you say it? When pitching over the phone or at a networking event, how will it sound? and what does it say about you?
- How would it look on a business card, T-shirt or mug??
- How will you identify the name as a logo?
Step 4
Register your company
If you need to register your company with Companies House then you have three main options:
- Use an Accountant – you will need an Accountant anyway at some stage, so this maybe a good time to look around and speak to a few companies to see who is a good fit.
- Use a Company Formation provider – There are many Company Formation providers out there, they do the leg work for you, make things very simple, but of course do charge a premium for the service.
- Go straight to Companies House website and follow the step by step guide it costs only £12 to do it this way, and is not difficult, but of course you do not get the support of either of the 2 options above and it can take a little longer but only about 24 hours or so.
Step 5
Register your domain
As I have mentioned before, a Domain is the unique identifier for your business on the world wide web (Internet). You can use a range of companies like Go Daddy, Fasthosts or our the provider we use, IONOS. You may also at this stage choose to go for a package that includes hosted Email or Office 365 and a step by step easy to use Webbuilder or Hosted Website Service like WordPress.
Step 6
Register for your Social Media presence
Social media in some form is an absolute must. You may not want to use all of the primary forms of social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) in the beginning, but secure the names anyway and choose how to use them later.
Step 7
Consider a Logo and Brand identity
There are a range of companies and individuals who can help you be really inventive here. Using sites like PeoplePerHour.com can be really helpful for a range of free lance services so take a look at that site. You can also get marketing agencies and some of the website providers also may be able to provide design services. The key here is to get it right, the ‘Brand identity’ is key, you don;t want to change it too often, and you want it to be consistent across platforms, so be 100% happy with it. A good designer will take time to understand you, and your business, and give a range of designs to choose from or modify until you find ‘the one’.
Step 8
Start to think about the Web Presence
I referred to it earlier in Step 5 and there are many providers to choose from. We prefer to use IONOS for the ease of use and good service. For a simple site you can use a step by step IONOS Webbuilder project, or go more bespoke and opt for a Hosted Website Service like WordPress. If you want to use eCommerce IONOS have that too. But before you start the Website project, give consideration to how you want it to look, and need it to achieve.
You should roughly draw out pages, it’s also useful to take a look at your most successful competition and see how they approach this. You may want to just start with a basic holding page for now, but remember to always cover off at least (either in 1 page or ideally a page for each):
- Home page: This is a summary of your business, first impressions count so make sure your pitch is on there.
- Products and/or Services page: Outlining your key business products and services. (you can go in depth or summarise and create sub pages for each key element.
- Contact us page: let people know how to easily contact you, include email, address, telephone or other method
Remember you can build upon this but keep it simple, informative and clean. If you are going to build a comprehensive site, you should also consider SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) but it is best to get professional help with this, as it is a dark art.
Step 9
Create your email accounts
You will need email accounts for at least one contact/person. You may need an account for many people and could also have distribution groups such as sales@, or support@ (to go to more than one person). Key things to consider here are:
- Do not use a free email service like iCloud, Gmail etc for business. It does not create a professional image and will not scale as you grow
- Create scalable and simple naming convention. Such as firstname.lastname@semanticconsultancy,com. This can easily be remembered and avoids mistakes.
- Do not use firstname only. It is a simple oversight, for me I could have just used nick@semanticconsultancy.com, however it lacks the appearance of depth in a business, and also scale. When I employ another Nick, I would then have to start creating a different naming convention anyway, such as nickp@, or nick.potts@ and so on. So it is important to start as you mean to go on.
Step 10
Think about hard literature and materials
Consider business cards, and leaflets/flyers. What will you need to create to promote your business physically? What do you want to say and how will it look? When you order any of these items you will have minimum orders so be happy with the creation. Again, keep things clean, readable and simple.Free lancers are again really good here and using sites like PeoplePerHour.com can prove valuable and cost effective.
Step 11
Appoint that Accountant
Your Accountant will be a crucial part of your newco team. Good Accountants will help with advice on tax laws and regulations, as well as helping with compiling, reviewing and filing VAT and Tax returns. Some Accountants will also wrap in your personal Self Assessment Tax responsibilities, and advice on good money management, and compensation plans for Directors.
Step 12
Choose your Core Business Systems
This is a step often overlooked and downplayed when creating your business. However over look it at your peril. This is a good time to get advice from a business coach, and IT cloud consultant. It is important for someone to work with you to breakdown the business model, how it will work, what it needs to work, and then map the most appropriate applications to the business processes. Core considerations could be:
- Financials – Again there is no ‘correct’ platform, it depends on the business needs. In isolation pure Finance only products such as the SaaS solutions Xero and Quickbooks, are up there in terms of market adoption mainly due to flexible pricing models and rich features.
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management) – will be appropriate to most business types. Essentially CRM will provide a database for all contact information and data relevant to your customers. Some CRM providers like Hubspot also provide pipeline management to track all sales activities. Other similar companies for SME CRM are ZOHO, and for business with growth plans may want to use market leader Salesforce.com
- Marketing – It is best to get a marketing platform that bolts on to your CRM if possible. Again Hubspot is good for Startups and SME business and offers an integrated Marketing engine.
- Unified business platforms – such as Netsuite are built with an end to end business in mind. The great thing about Netsuite is that it is SaaS only. Netsuite covers each business function you can think of, each module is licenced and activated as you need it. So you can start with the base requirements and turn on modules as you need them. I have implemented and operated Netsuite for many years’ and it truly is exceptional. What is great is that Netsuite offers Enterprise grade applications to business of all types and sizes and is truly a platform that grows as you do.
- POS (Point of Sale) – Many of the applications already mentioned either have inbuilt POS features, or have APIs which allow you to integrate them. As is the new normal, there are on premise applications, with SaaS options, and true born in the cloud SaaS services available.
- Payroll- For an SME you can use specialist payroll providers to help with this, they will take the salary information and give you all of the data to input into your Financial system, and generate the payslips. Some Finance systems also provide payroll as a module, but in a startup it’s best to use a professional.
Step 13
Setup your bank account
There are a plethora of options here and we cannot give any form of financial advice.
You can go the traditional route and use a high street brand, or go online and app only with companies like Starling, Tide and Revolut. It is important to do your research, get what is best for you. You could use online comparison sites, or if you have sorted out Step 11 then ask your Accountant for advice.
Step 14
Meet with a Company Solicitor
I know that you probably think, “Solicitors are expensive” and “I can do most of this myself with google”. There is a reason, and a very good reason that Solicitors exist. Over looking the value of good legal advice can be very expensive, far more so than not using one. Choose wisely, you don’t need to start off with the big hitters of this world. Solicitors of good standing and reputation are available also in smaller practices. Do your research, get some free consultation, and then choose one that you feel will work best with you. At this early stage, it is probably only necessary to get legal advice on documents like; the company articles of association, shareholders agreement (if there are more than 1), and customer and supplier contracts and terms. They will not cost the earth, and you will be happy that you made the investment.
Summary
We have listed above the first steps and major considerations when starting your company. Steps 15 onward will be published in our next article.
Remember creating your dream and taking control of your destiny is an exciting and truly rewarding journey. At the same time it is hard work and will only reward you properly once you commit to it. If you treat it like a hobby you had better have another income stream as it will pay you like a hobby. It is also (and I speak from experience), best to get professional help and guidance along the way, even in the early days. Learn from people who have walked the walk. Take all the advice that you can get (you don’t have to use it all). Do your due diligence, and do not skimp on legal advice. And most of all enjoy it.
Good luck!
If you would like help with business growth and development, contact us today.
We will be delighted to arrange a FREE initial consultation to discuss your plans, and arrange the next steps to help you on your journey
(Semantic may on occasion receive a fee from companies that we recommend. That said we will never recommend a product or service that we do not or would not use ourselves and believe it to be a best of breed recommendation.)