Business Foundations
Your first foundation is figuring out your finances. One of the most important things to consider when starting your own business is your finances. Will you start your business as a side hustle, while working in your full-time or part-time job or do you have the finances to take your business full-time straight away?
The advantage of starting your business as a side hustle is that you’ll have the financial security of receiving a wage while getting your business set up. If you’re going to take your business full time straight away, you’ll need to make sure you have enough money saved up to cover your living costs and for any unexpected events for at least a year, while your business is growing. Next up is deciding what business you will start.
Find your passion.
To start, the best way to get ideas for a business to start is by identifying your skills, education and passions that could be translated into a business idea.
Skills are things that you have experience with that you know you’re good at and you enjoy doing. Education is the knowledge you’ve acquired through school, college and life experiences and passions are what makes you excited about life and what you truly want to do. Think about each of these points and identify a business idea that falls into at least one of these categories.
Create a business plan.
Next, create a business plan to validate your idea by creating a minimal viable product, for example, a product or service that you can put together straight away and offer straight away, and it doesn’t take weeks or months to create and also to see if it has a market fit. Then look at your target audience.
What’s your target audience?
Who are they? What do they need? Where do they hang out? What are their demographics and are there any pain points that they have that you can solve with your product or service?
Who are your competitors?
Next, ask yourself: who are your competitors?
Have you identified who your competitors are? Are you aware of the different strengths and weaknesses of your competitors? It’s important to be aware of your competitors, so consider what your competitors are doing and understand what distinguishes you from them.
Register your business name.
After you’ve identified your business foundations, the second step is to register your business. You can register your business name with the company’s registration office.
Registering your business name is an important step when starting your own business. The process is very straightforward and doesn’t take that long. You fill out an or BN1 form online with the company’s registration office.
If you’re setting up your business as a sole trader, you’ll have to register for income tax with the revenue.
As a self-employed sole trader, you can do this by registering online with revenue’s online services.
Online presence.
The third step is to create a logo website and social media accounts. Having an online presence is vital when starting your own business. A logo, a nice website, and social media accounts will help.
You have a few different options for your logo. You can create it yourself using free online tools like Canva or Crello.
If you’d like to get one designed for you, you can hire a graphic designer on websites like Fiverr or Upwork, or hire a digital marketing agency to do one for you for your website. You could create one for free on Squarespace, Wix or Brizy Cloud. And just like your logo, you could get a website designed for you by a website developer on the likes of Fiverr or Upwork.
If you feel like you have a unique design like your logo and you’d like to protect the design, you can apply for a trademark with the intellectual property office of Ireland.
Set up a bank account for your business
The fourth step is to set up a business bank account. Setting up a bank account for a business can seem like a daunting task for anyone new to the world of business.
So where do you start to decide which bank you want to go with?
There are a few different banks out there that offer business bank accounts like AIB Bank of Ireland, Permanent TSB and online banks, like N26.
I’d suggest going over your available options, identifying the features that matter most to you and picking a bank account that is the right fit for you.
Establish your business processes.
The fifth step is to establish your business processes. As you establish your business, you will need to make sure that you are developing processes that handle different areas of your business, like sales, marketing, customer support and accounting. The success of your business depends on the quality of your business processes, so that means putting the right systems in place to allow your business to run smoother.
That’s all for today.
Should you need help with company formation, bookkeeping, payroll outsourcing or any other tax or accounting related matter, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.