what must an entrepreneur do after creating a business plan?

The Next Steps for an Entrepreneur after Creating a Business Plan

1. Conducting Market Research

The importance of market research – Market research is an essential activity for an entrepreneur. Identify which are the most effective methods of market research for your industry. Test your product/service before entering the market. Conduct a test launch to ascertain its potential within the market. Your aim being to gain a sufficient insight into how your product/service will work, before you risk a full launch. Identifying the type of people who will buy your product and react positively to your business idea is also crucial. This information will be evaluated against the general size and growth of that type of market and determine its potential. Finally, you should assess the current competition within this target market. This includes all products/services that could represent a viable alternative to the customer. Data then needs to be collected and assessed against national and/or global economic trends that could affect the market and the industry you are entering. Market research is an ongoing process and continues as long as the business is in operation. However, there are times when conducting further research may be stalled or postponed due to constraints. Any decision made here should be based on a risk assessment comparing the cost of the research against the potential increased cost of wrong decisions made without it.

2. Securing Funding for the Business

Funding from family and friends would be one of the easiest methods of getting money for your business without any collateral involved. Asking for a loan from a relative, family member, or friend is pretty straightforward. It may not be good to get a loan from a moneylender because the interest rates using your paycheck as a form of repaying the loan can be quite hefty. This may also lead to further borrowings to fund, ending up in a debt trap. It is very crucial to lay down a very detailed plan of how and when you are going to use the money and how you are going to repay them. Failure to do so might result in strained relationships, and it would be an even greater loss if the family or friend expected you to use the money fund for another purpose and you ended up failing the business.

To assume one requires an intricate business plan and is already a limitation in what capital to invest in your business plan, securing funding for your business might just be an attempt to get more money to fuel your business further. There are a variety of methods to secure funding for a business. There are secured and unsecured methods of funding. Unsecured methods of funding usually do not involve any form of collateral, lead or any interference in your possession of the money funded to you. For secured funding, it may involve collateral of certain value or a lien on an asset, where failure to adhere to the terms and conditions of the funding might result in the loss of the asset or collateral. As to which method of funding is better, it is entirely up to your discretion.

3. Assembling the Right Team

There are 3 important rules for putting together the right team: Rule 1: Know what you are looking for. Define the job and the skills required. The first impulse may be to look for someone “like me” or someone with a certain personality. But this can be a recipe for disaster. Effective employees are effective because they have the right skills and experiences. It’s smarter to use specific criteria for hiring. Rule 2: Actively recruit and sell top candidates. Effective hiring is not a passive activity. Effective entrepreneurs network and maintain numerous contacts. When the need arises, they can rapidly assemble a pool of good candidates. When the hiring starts, they can sell the job and the company to those whom they are most interested in. Rule 3: Hire slow and fire fast. Employee decisions are too important to be rushed. Most entrepreneurs agree that haste makes waste on the hiring front, and that the biggest hiring mistakes have been choosing someone too quickly. A methodical hiring approach involves multiple interviews and other assessment techniques, and checking candidates’ references. This is time-consuming but can prevent hiring mistakes. Despite the care in hiring, employee turnover is inevitable. So part two of the rule is “fire fast”. Terminating an employee who is not working out is a favor to all involved and it opens the opportunity to hire the right replacement.

Assembling the right team is crucial for the small business owner. The most important ingredient for a successful business is the right mix of people. The team will be setting the course for the business and determines the end success or failure. A successful entrepreneur will be able to find and utilize the right people for the right jobs. Those who have built a small business often say that finding the right people is the biggest challenge. It is also a task that’s never complete. New situations can call for new skills, or unexpectedly reveal an employee’s hidden talent.

4. Implementing the Business Plan

Series of the primary problem that most of the entrepreneurs face is where they should start their plan. Some entrepreneurs have the fear of failing that they don’t even start their plan. Some entrepreneurs say that they are confused on how to convert their plan into the business. Sometimes problems come from experienced entrepreneurs when they have too many ideas so they do not know which one to implement. The series on implementing a business plan will guide you in order to start your step in implementing your plan in real business. First thing to do in implementing your business plan is to decide what kind of form you want for your business. Business system is using many kinds of forms depending on the category. The form could be in the form of a software system, retail or wholesale where the entrepreneurs only need to find a good location to start the business, and manufacturer. After that, entrepreneurs need to search the regulations to the government because every form of business usually has different kinds of regulation. The next step is determining the target market. Decide who will be the consumer obtaining the product or service that you offered and where the location to find them. By doing this stage, at least you have completed the design on the basic concepts of your business and will get an idea what to do next.

5. Evaluating and Adjusting the Business Strategy

Having developed the strategies, you now have the resources to evaluate the feasibility of the decisions made. This involves breaking the strategy down into small parts, then setting criteria that it must meet. Thinking through the strategy beginning to end, with the perspective of the customer in mind, allows the evaluation to be more insightful. Spotting potential problems and the success of the strategies would be greatly anticipated by use of a Before-After Analysis. Here, the forecasts of the results are compared with the actual outcome. By using questionnaires and interviews to monitor the customer’s satisfaction with both the products and the organisation, a business is able to gather the most constructive feedback on their performance. This is because the customer has the choice to be honest since it is not a direct interaction with the business itself. Understanding the value of a customer enables cumulative analysis to measure changes in revenue against the costs of keeping the customer. This provides a clear insight into which decisions have been beneficial and those that have not.