Business plan.
The business plan does not necessarily have to be like for investors. We need a simple business plan that describes: a product or service, the market (who are the customers, what are their features), competitors (what they sell, who their customers are, what their competitive advantages), your pricing (what price will be assigned to the goods/services), your sales strategy (how will you get clients).
The second part of the business plan must include calculations: how much gross income you expect to receive per month and what expenses will need to business (one-time investments and ongoing costs). The business plan must be no weak places. If you see that the costs in the first few months will significantly exceed income, it is necessary to clearly define the source of investment. You cannot leave this and other similar issues. A business plan should contain 3 options of payment: option "if everything goes perfectly", the option "average", the option "if all will be much worse than we think". And for each variant must have their own development plans and strategies of behavior in the market.
Cash flow generation — effective sales.
Sales should be from the first day, and it is better to find customers even in advance. Every day of downtime without customers after the opening of the business is detrimental. The sales strategy must be built accurately, you should clearly answer the question — where and how are we going to find clients? It should be noted that free ways to attract customers is practically nonexistent. Yes, at first you can collect a certain number of customers who accidentally or recommendations will come to you, but the farther, the harder and more expensive to attract new customers. If you open the retail market, it has to be well thought out mass advertising. In the market of legal persons one of the guaranteed and relatively inexpensive ways to attract are a direct sales (or simply call customer). The sales strategy must pass the "Elevator test". You should be able to explain the random interlocutor your idea of attracting customers for the thirty seconds until you go a few floors in the Elevator.
The quality of service.
From the first day you have to be the best. In service, in efficiency, in quality of goods or services. The key to success is to give the customer values more than he paid. Very important to the quality presentation materials. You just have to be a quality logo, nice business cards, letterhead, well-designed commercial offers, the site (especially if you sell services). Assessing the quality the client is looking primarily for experience, recommendations, and you have this yet, so the only guarantee will be the quality of your website, business cards, to be able to say: "this is serious".
The help of professionals
Better from the first day to lay in the costs of outsourcing certain processes in your new business, that is, to delegate certain functions to professionals from other companies. Accounting and legal service, recruitment of highly qualified personnel, advertising and promotion, computer maintenance. These are such spheres without any experience in which you or your hired employees will spend a lot of time, while providing questionable results. Often, tormented with self-selection of sales Director, or running advertising campaigns, you'll still have to pay the professionals, but precious time has been already lost. To ensure sales is also critically important to choose an advertising Agency that will guarantee you results in the form of a stream of customers. Or pick up a marketing Agency, offering services of search of clients.
The analysis of indicators.
From the first day of work the objective analysis of all indicators, characterizing the development of the business. Often at the beginning of the business owner is so consumed with staff turnover, emerging issues, organizational processes that recalls the strategic management only through long time, when much has been lost. Therefore, from the very first month of work you need to collect all kinds of internal statistics, and to continue to collect information about the market to compare the received data with the business plan and to adjust their actions. For example, if planned sales volume is not achieved even half for many months, it is urgent to analyze the reasons, the omission of a business plan to change something in the strategy and tactics of the business. Also, it is possible to miss the point of the systematic cost overruns. After several months this deficit will turn into a significant amount that is not easy to cover.
Starting any business is trial and error after you get the main thing — your experience, so every year your business will be more successful than the previous one. Most importantly, be able to extract this experience and take it into account in further planning.