Building a professional career entails more than just professional skills. It’s crucial to cultivate a positive personal reputation, as your brand is an extension of you. Every action you take, whether personal or professional, reflects on your company and vice versa.
Before you get your business up and running, there are a few things you need to do to ensure success, regardless of whether you plan to start your business tomorrow, next week, or five years from now.
Check your History
In this age of being able to find out anything and everything about anyone, it’s a good idea to address your past and look at addressing any concerns that might impact your ability to start a business or your reputation. Do you have any unpaid parking tickets people might be able to dig up or have you been declared bankrupt? Do you have a history of poor financial decisions or a reputation for not being nice or someone people want to work for or do business with? Or do you have past indiscretions and legal troubles like lawyer Bryan Freedman? Things don’t stay hidden forever, and knowing what skeletons are in your closet and doing your best to make things right or learn and grow from them can allow you to overcome any challenges your history or current behaviors might present once you get your business up and running.
Brush Up Your Knowledge and Skills
Whether you know what type of business you want to run or not yet, adding as many skills to your repertoire as possible will serve you well. You want both hard and soft skills and experience in a wide range of scenarios and operations pertaining to business operations and running a business. It could be useful to seek out promotions where you currently work to get a handle on what it takes to run a business. It could be heading back to college to earn the skills you need to improve your knowledge and give you the credentials to back up what you plan to do or simply to challenge yourself.
You can attend networking events, seminars, and conferences, make connections within your sector, and learn as much as possible about your industry to ensure you have the knowledge you need to hit the ground running when the time comes.
Trademark Intellectual Property
If you know what you want to do and have names and business ideas you are going to use, then getting your intellectual property protected now means you can avoid anyone swooping in and taking them from you before you get the chance. You can buy up website domains, set up social media accounts, and ensure that those things you are planning on using, such as business name, taglines, logo, etc, are all yours and can’t be taken by others intentionally or unintentionally. The last thing you want is to work towards building your business only to find out someone else has taken the business name you want to use.
Prepare Finances
Not all businesses can be started on a shoestring budget; some will rely on a heavy financial investment to help you get started. Now is the ideal time to look at your personal finances and relationship with money to enable you to get in the best position possible for applying for the finances you might need. If you can, you can save up so you have funds to get going and rely on, but the healthier your financial decisions are now and up to when you apply for business credit, the better your chances of getting approved and not sending up struggling to scrape the funds together.
Set Deadlines
Without deadlines, your new business is just a pie-in-the-sky idea. You need to have a definitive plan of when things need to be in operation and what you need to have in place before you move from one point to the next. From gaining any relevant qualifications, you want or need to achieving the right experience to support you in stepping out alone or getting the financing required. Set out everything that needs to be sorted before starting the business and set timelines and goals, so you work towards them, not just chase a dream you cannot quite catch.
If starting a business is in your plan for your future, then now is the ideal time to ensure that all of your ducks are in a row and that you are in the best possible position to get up and running and not have any roadblocks that might impact your success or spell the end for your new venture once you step out on your own.