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When you work for yourself, you might have more job security than if you work in a corporation as an employee. Since you’re making all the decisions, you have more control over the risks and rewards you face. You also have the option to diversify your business model should you find a more profitable income stream.
Unfortunately, what might hold you back from starting your own business is that you’ve always been an employee and have never learned any business skills. Still, there is something you may not have considered: business is a learnable skill, and if you focus on building one around your passion, you’ll have all the motivation and drive to learn everything you need to know about running it.
Here are a few ideas to keep in mind when starting a small business with just a few employees from scratch around your passion.
Build a Dream Team
After you’ve defined your business idea and borrowed enough money to build it, focus on building your team. Rather than hiring employees who know less than you do, hire people who know more than you do. Your job is to lead and coordinate everything rather than to simply direct people to do some of the things that you don’t have time to do yourself.
While some members of your business team might be partners, others could be employees. When hiring people, follow the traditional recruiting process: advertise open positions on job boards, go over the cover letters and resumes you receive, and arrange interviews. When you decide to hire someone, do a job background check.
It’s possible to start with a small team and then expand it. For example, when Steve Jobs followed his passion to start a computer business out of his father’s family garage, he partnered with Steve Wozniak, who knew far more about coding than he did. Their first employee was Bill Fernandez, who worked in hardware, then software, then user interface design. As the business grew, more employees worked for the fledgling company.
Build an Online Audience
Since it’s easier and more cost-effective to build an online business, that is a good place to start your business. The success of your business will depend on how well you can find loyal followers.
While the traditional approach has always been to first build a product or service and then find an audience who needs what you’re selling, some digital entrepreneurs, have found success by first focusing on finding an audience and then building a product around their identified needs.
Finding an audience before building a product often succeeds because you’ll first find out what your target audience is interested in and then build a product around it.
Taking a product-first approach is based on taking a wild guess about people’s needs while taking an audience-first approach is based on making an educated guess on what people need.
One way to launch an audience-first approach is to build a blog around your passion and build relationships with people in your niche on social media platforms to get a good idea of their needs and wants. Once you’ve identified a good solution to a common problem that people in your niche experience, you could write an eBook to offer your solution and sell it from your blog platform to your social media group members.
If your book sells well, then you can then build a website and develop other products around your solution, perhaps creating an online course to teach people skills that you’ve spent years learning and that others would love to learn.
In sum, business is a learnable skill, and you will increase your chances of success by building a team and by building an audience.
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- Evernote
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