What motivates you? What do you feel passionate about? What activity do you like to do most? Everyone has a unique combination of talents, sometimes you have too many of them and get confused about what is the one.
Even if you can’t hear that mystical inner voice telling you what to pursue , don’t worry. Develop a passion! Instead of knowing that one passion , it is best to come up with a winning strategy of developing a passion that is aligned with market demand.
What should be your passion?
- Be Critical about Market Demand: Before getting all excited and spending energy on logo design, web site design, it is wise to look deeply and be critical. Think – “Is there really a demand there or am I deluding myself?”
- Assess what you can do now and what you can do in future: What you think is your skill or strength may be just the baseline of what your complete dedication can get you to do. Question to ask is “can I develop a skill that I don’t know yet to meet the market demand?”. Find the things you can do easily and you have seen is harder for others. Is it cooking, event organization, fitness, coding , graphic design, cleaning, gardening, coaching, arts and design, accounting, virtual assistance, blogger, writer? The list is long – but you know what you are naturally inclined to do.
Now it’s time to compare 1 and 2 and see if you can find an intersection.
What’s next after finding passion?
This is where things get harder and reality kicks in. Soon after identifying your passion , you should follow these steps to get started.
- Turn your passion into Business Idea: The idea needs to come out of your head and needs to be written out thoroughly as a business plan. If you need help getting started and need coaches, you can go here.
- Worry about your money: Starting a business may not require a lot of investment but you should know and plan for what’s coming up. You can use simple tools like excel to at-least note down the start up cost and the expected cost for the next 12 months.
- One Time Cost Items:
- License and Permits
- Equipment
- Legal Fees
- Insurance
- Branding
- Branding Research
- Inventory
- Trademarking
- Property Lease
- Grand Opening cost
- Ongoing cost
- Rent
- Utility
- Marketing and Advertising
- Production
- Supplies
- Travel Expense
- Employee Salary
- Your salary
- One Time Cost Items:
- Setup your business: This will be the time to establish your location and branding .
- Branding: Develop your website, design your logo. Experts in the market who can help you with this
- Web Designer
- Graphic Designer
- Blog Writer
- Product: While you are at working on your branding you need to simultaneously develop your product or the content for your service you offer.
- Hire Help:You can possibly run the business all by yourself but not for very long. Try to find areas where you can outsource some of your work to other people so you can focus on branding your company.
- Branding: Develop your website, design your logo. Experts in the market who can help you with this
- Customer Acquisition: Once your business is up , you need to start attracting clients and customers. There are many ways to this, but the best way is to start jotting all of your ideas into a Marketing Plan and take one step at a time towards the goal.
- Operation Management: When you sell something you need a Point of Sale, you need Inventory to track your products. If you are selling your skills as service then you need a Scheduling tool to go to your customer location. All of these can be done by antique paper and pen method. Or you can hop into the digital transformation platform provided by ServiceWorks to make your operation smoother and efficient.
Grow your business with ServiceWorks
Its a lot of dedication and handwork to get a business started. But once the wheel has spun it’s more than likely you will go further than you even thought of. About two-thirds of business survive two years in business, half of all businesses will survive five years, and one-third will survive 10 years.
ServiceWorks is here to take the chores away from you to save you time , so that you can focus on your branding, customer acquisition and product development.