by Shazan Qureshi
After floating four companies over the last three years and acknowledged my childhood passion for the stock market, I’ve found a lot of economic talk is heavily theoretical and needs translating into a real life business context. By providing expert advice with guest columnists, as well as sharing experience and insight my aim is to help you make your enterprises asset rich and ultimately give you the freedom of choice in how you wish to exit or retain your business.
WHAT TYPE OF BUSINESS SHOULD YOU START ?
You’ve made the decision to start a business. Now you’re asking yourself, “What type of business should I start?” Once you’ve worked your way through these five decisions, you will have a much better idea of exactly what type of business you want to start.
1 Retail or wholesale type of business? Where do you want to be positioned on the supply chain? Retail businesses sell goods directly to consumers. Wholesalers buy goods from manufacturers or importers and then sell them to retailers and other distributors.
2 Franchise or independent type of business?
Many established companies offer franchises. If you buy a franchise, you are buying the right to sell the company’s goods and/or services in a specific area. Besides paying a franchise fee, you will have to pay royalties and perhaps additional fees to the franchisor. An independent business is one that you create and nurture on your own.
3 Product or service (or mix of both) type of business?
If you are a trained professional, such as a dentist or accountant, your business is going to revolve around the services you can provide. But there are many professionals that also have the opportunity to offer related products.
14 - WORK
If you’re not a trained professional, the key to deciding whether to focus on products or services is determining where your true talents lie and what you most enjoy doing. DO NOT base this decision on whether or not you enjoy selling or are good at it. No matter what type of business you start, you will be involved in sales.
4 Storefront or non-storefront type of business operation?
If you have decided to start a business selling products, you need a storefront of some kind, whether bricks and mortar, such as a retail store, or virtual, such as an e-commerce site. Many successful businesses have both, expanding their customers beyond their local area.
If you have decided to start a business selling services, you may or may not want a storefront. Many different services are actually performed at a customer’s home. Some services can be offered over the phone or the internet, such as the services offered by Virtual Assistants or some business coaches. These businesses often depend on virtual storefronts to attract clients.
Another option is to use your home as a storefront. While B&Bs are the obvious example of this, there are many other services that can operate successfully as home-based businesses, from travel agents through hairdressing.
5 In which industry/topic? To make it easier on yourself, choose an industry or topic that you are not only interested in but have some expertise or experience. Otherwise, you're going to have to spend a lot of time and money educating yourself that you could be putting into your new business, or worse, making costly mistakes because you don't have the necessary knowledge.
And the winning type of business is... Now you’re ready to look for a business that fits the bill. Let’s suppose, for instance, that you’ve decided that you want to start a business that’s retail, independent, product based, has a storefront and is related to gardening.
Then the businesses that you might start (or look to buy) would include nurseries, garden shops, or a business specialising in gardening-related products, such as greenhouses or hydroponic equipment.
You can see that this still gives you a really broad range of choices, but has narrowed these choices down to the types of businesses you are most interested in owning or operating, as opposed to wandering through the whole bewildering array of possibilities.
For further professional advice and a confidential one-to-one please email
shazan@rejuvenateonline.co.uk
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