How to Turn Your Great Ideas Into a Profitable Business Strategy (Guest Blog)
So you’ve been working on a new product or service concept, but you’re hitting a wall when it comes to turning those ideas into a profitable venture. Take comfort in knowing you’re not alone.
Most entrepreneurs hit this stall when working on their startup business ideas. There is a lot to consider, especially when thinking about the financial feasibility of building a business from the ground up.
Thankfully, there are some effective strategies all entrepreneurs can follow to minimize setbacks in the early stages of startup development and increase their likelihood of seeing early profits.
Make Sure to Validate Your Business Concept
Creativity and passion can lead many entrepreneurs to make a quick leap into a new venture. But even the most brilliant ideas need validation before backing them financially. It’s important to take good care of your capital during the early stages of business development, and taking the time to test your business concepts before acting on them is critical for achieving this.
Looking for ways to gather market intelligence and audience insights helps you get the validation you need for your new business ideas. While it’s definitely an investment of time and resources, conducting market research in the form of focus groups or surveys or using a third-party industry analysis tool helps you feel confident that you are on to something with good profitability potential.
Pave a Profitable Path
There is no point in trying to start a business if you don’t have a clear plan in place for gaining sustainable revenues. Of course, it’s only rational to accept that getting to this stage will require certain investments. The important thing to maintain is balance and avoid common spending pitfalls that lead to stretching budgets too thin too early.
Having a well-thought-out growth strategy ahead of time can help to avoid this. When you have a clear roadmap for your business, it helps you to stay focused on your primary objects and helps you to create more resilience. Similar to a home renovation project, you need to keep your plan and budget closely aligned to make all of your projects a success while still staying profitable.
Acquire the Necessary Funding
To get your startup company off the ground, you need to make sure you have adequate funding in place. However, this process is rarely straightforward for entrepreneurs since there are a lot of things to consider, most notably the advantages and disadvantages of giving up equity early on to help fuel more growth.
It’s important not to let short-term gains overshadow any long-term goals you have for your business. While gaining new investors can be a catalyst to help get your business up and running, bootstrapping can be another strategy for managing your spending and helping you maintain full control over the business.
Bootstrapping involves building and growing a business without needing to rely on outside investments. While this requires more financial discipline, especially since entrepreneurs need to fund the businesses out of their own pockets, it means being able to keep full equity and puts less stress on you to answer to investors or banking institutions.
Similar to deciding on whether to sell a home as-is or make major renovations to increase its value, the decisions you make for your business will depend primarily on what your primary goals are. If you’re looking to simply scale your business to a point where it can be resold, investors may make sense so long as their vision aligns with that plan.
Bring on a Capable Team
The success of your business will likely depend on how well you can assemble a team. Even when you’ve decided to keep your business as lean as possible, you’ll still need qualified individuals to help you manage your account processes, sales and marketing efforts, or customer service if you’re looking to scale in any way.
Attracting top talent when a startup business is still in development can be challenging. Not everyone gets excited about the opportunity to work with a company that no one else has before. It’s often a leap of faith for everyone in the business.
To make this leap more rational for individuals, you’ll want to create the right incentives early on. This can include offering an attractive salary and benefits package and incorporating perks that not all businesses offer, like company equity or profit sharing.
Start Networking Right Away
Many entrepreneurs have the habit of feeling like they need to figure out all the answers themselves. But there are countless amounts of similar businesses and industry professionals that can help startups get their foot in the door and expand on new ideas or growth initiatives.
Starting to network right away is important when launching a new startup. Expanding your list of contacts and connecting with other like-minded entrepreneurs helps you to gain more perspective in the industry. This can be invaluable when learning how to address new business challenges that come your way and will ultimately help you build a better business.
Protect Your Interests
Struggling with tunnel vision is something that all business owners can sympathize with. When your primary focus is on building new revenue streams and keeping banks happy with your growth trends, many other things can quickly become secondary priorities.
However, protecting your assets is another important consideration that all business owners should make. This is especially important when it comes to your intellectual property (IP) rights or product trademarks. Understanding the various “loopholes” that competing brands can navigate to compromise these is essential.
While this may mean contracting legal professionals to help you secure all of your digital assets, the peace of mind of knowing that your business is protected can be well worth the investment.
Start Bringing Your Business Vision to Life
It can be really exciting to start a new business, even though the barriers to entry into the market can vary considerably from one industry to another. However, this shouldn’t hold you back from putting things in motion and taking the necessary steps to build a sustainable business roadmap you can follow.
By following the strategies discussed and working to keep your business agile and adaptive to new market developments, you’ll be able to capitalize on new opportunities as they come while growing your business sustainably year over year.
About the Author
Dalip Jaggi is an entrepreneur, technologist, and passionate business leader sum up the core of Dalip Jaggi, co-founder of Revive Real Estate, a PropTech company with a goal to democratize house flipping. Since its 2020 inception, Revive has since become the smartest solution for homeowners to maximize their home’s sales value across the nation.