Launching Your Business - How to start small business - Part 6

Launching Your Business

1. Secure space. Whether it's an office, or a warehouse, if you need more space than your garage or your spare bedroom, now's the time to get that.

• If you don't generally need an office beyond your home, but may occasionally need meeting space, there are often places downtown that can address those needs. A quick Google search on "business meeting rentals [your city/state]" will deliver plenty of rental options in your area.

2. Build your product or develop your service. Once you have the business all planned, financed, and have your basic level of staffing, get going. Whether that's sitting down with the engineers and getting the software coded and tested, or getting materials sourced and shipped to your fabrication room (aka "garage"), or purchasing in bulk and marking up the price, the building process is the time during which you prepare for market. During this time, you may discover things such as:

• Needing to tweak the ideas. Perhaps the product needs to be a different color, texture or size. Maybe your services need to be broader, narrower or more detailed. This is the time to attend to anything that crops up during your testing and development phases. You'll know innately when something needs tweaking to make it better or to make it less like a competitor's stale offerings.
• Getting feedback. Friends and family make great resources for asking questions and getting feedback––don't hesitate to use them as your sounding board.
• Needing to increase the size of your premises. This happens more often than expected. Once the stock starts piling up, you may find it ends up in your living room, bedroom and the garden shed. Think rental of storage premises if needed.

3. Launch your product or your service. When the product is all built, packaged, coded, online, and ready to sell, or when your services are fully worked out and ready to go, hold a special event to launch your business. Send out a press release, announce it to the world. Tweet it, Facebook it, let the word resound to all corners of your market—you have a new business!

• Hold a party and invite people who can spread the word for you. It doesn't need to be pricey––purchase the food and drink from bulk discount stores and get family and friends to help with catering (you can give them a product or service in return).