Читать книгу Finance & Grow Your New Business - Angie Mohr - Страница 16

Before you make a final decision as to what type of business to open, make sure that your personal goals and business goals are synchronized by asking yourself the following questions.

1. What are my personal financial goals?

If you want to retire a millionaire in ten years time and you are going to open a small shoe-repair shop, you may not be able to meet your goals. Analyze where you want to be in five or ten years. Do you want a larger house? Be able to travel the world? Have your retirement fully funded? You’ll save yourself much grief down the road if you make sure that the type of business you start will provide you with the money you need for your intended lifestyle.

2. Will this business allow me to have the freedom I want to pursue other things?

If you start a business that is based around you being there all the time, you may not be able to pursue some of your personal goals or even to spend the time to plan and strategize for your business. Having a business that can be systematized to run without your constant presence will allow you more freedom.

3. Is the product or service easily marketable?

Starting a business that has a product or service that is understandable and needed by a large segment of the population is by far easier than developing a new product or service and having to both familiarize potential customers with it and, at the same time, convince them that they need it.

4. What are the barriers to entry for this industry?

Some industries are more difficult than others to “break into.” For an extreme example, it would be incredibly difficult to start up a new auto manufacturing company to compete with Ford or Daimler Chrysler. Likewise, it would be almost impossible to set up a new company to provide telephone service to the Eastern seaboard. In both of these examples, the start-up costs are monumental (design, manufacturing equipment, and showrooms in the first instance and switching stations and telephone cabling in the second). Also, these industries are dominated by a few very large players who have built name recognition and goodwill over many years.

Ensure that you choose an industry where there is room for new participants to grow.

5. Can the business weather downturns?

Every industry has up and down times. For example, travel agents book more vacations for their customers when the economy is on an upswing than when it’s in recession. A business can also be affected by how many new businesses in that industry are opening up. A flood of new providers can siphon off some of your customers, at least in the short term.

Look at whether the business you are contemplating will be able to survive external changes to its operating environment. Is your product or service easily adaptable? For example, in poor economic times, a spa will focus on advertising the basic services, such as haircuts. When times are good, it will promote higher-end services, such as massage, facials, and pedicures.

6. How easily can I expand this business?

If your goal is to grow your business over several years, it’s critical to determine upfront whether the business has the potential to do that. For example, if you start a grocery store in a small town, your customer base is limited to the residents of the town. You may find it difficult to grow such a business without offering new products.

Ensure that the business has the potential to grow quickly and expand either the customer base or the range of products or services.

7. Will my product or service endure?

The only constant in business is the knowledge that consumer tastes are ever changing. The product that may have been all the rage last month may be passé this month. Think back to pet rocks, fruit-flavored potato chips, and Rubik’s Cube. These items sold extremely well for an extremely short period of time. If you had built your business around one of these fads, however, you would soon have found revenues dropping precipitously and you would have been out of business quickly (unless, of course, your business hopped from fad to fad).

It’s important to make sure that your service or product is not a fad and will be needed long into the future.

8. Will I actually be able to make money with this business?

If you feel that you have found an under-serviced market niche, you need to examine why there are no other businesses serving that market. Many small businesses are able to create a toehold in an industry because large corporations would not be able to make enough profit serving that market to satisfy their investors. A small business has the advantage of lower overhead and more flexibility to move in and out of markets and can often create greater profits than its larger counterparts. However, if you want to do more than simply eke out a living running your business, make sure that the profit potential is there right from the beginning.