Are You Ready to Launch a Business?
When people are preparing to launch their business, there are two schools of thought that govern when they take that big leap. The first sort of person waits and waits for everything to be perfect: not just making sure they are prepared, but waiting for the world to be perfectly ready for them.
The other kind of person sees waiting doesn’t achieve anything and starts as soon as possible, to build a sense of momentum. Any shortcuts or errors can be rectified later, once your business is on a firmer footing. The important thing is to get started, now!
Unfortunately both of these extremes can lead you into trouble: if you don’t make your plans carefully your business won’t be long for this world – you might not even be sure there’s enough people out there to make a market for what you’re offering! On the other hand, trying to arrange everything perfectly before you start means never starting. Something will always need to be changed, or waited through, or redrafted, so at some point you have to take the plunge.
What can help you escape these two failure states are imposing some simple checks and thresholds on your business and on the market: you don’t proceed until those checks are successful, and you must proceed after they are. It stimulates you into action, but also makes sure it isn’t premature, and gives you the best chance of success.
The Market
Whether you’re launching a new business entirely, a new product or opening a new branch or office, you need to know that there are customers out there who want to spend their money on it, with it or in it. If your idea is unproven and untested, it could well fail and leave unable to recoup the money you’ve spent developing it. Whether this leaves you personally out of pocket or out of favour with investors depends on exactly how your business is set up, but either way it’s a far from ideal outcome.
You can find out more with a market research company like Attest: they have the reach and expertise to poll people and get actionable insights that help you know whether you’re presenting an attractive proposition to the market and what to change if you’re not.
Your Business
You also need to impose some standards on your own set up to make sure it’s ready to face the cold, hard realities of the market place. If you have investors, be they share-holders, bank managers, or a small number of wealthy angels, they might be a good resource to consult here: they’re keen to protect their investment so proactively working with them to do is a good way to build trust!
Once you know the market is ready for you and you are ready for the market there are no further bars to going ahead and chasing your dream!