No. #1 Step to do BEFORE Starting Your Business

There are plenty of things to do before opening up a business. Legal needs to be in order sure, is this a LLC, DBA, Sole Proprietor, etc.

You may think it’s team building having your chess pieces in place. And none of these are bad answers their just the wrong one.

Drum roll please....:.....

The act of gathering information about consumers needs and preferences.

In any business transaction there is the consumer and a provider. The people that make the most in business are the people that learn how to take what they have find the most amount of consumers and provide that same thing.

No matter how good your product or service is without consumers you won’t be profitable. So the first step to understand the lay of the land who are your consumers. Who are you targeting? Who is your closet competition? What attracts customers/consumers? All of these are questions that you can get from having a large sample size of potential consumers.

SURVEYING YOUR CONSUMER

Before you spend a dime, sign a paper, it’s important that you know how you will be able to generate money and how long it will take you as well. Surveying people that fit your target customer will help identify your idea, product, or service’s value before you even hit the market.

In a survey you can get to know your customers better.

Everything from what they make in earnings, what colors most attract them, words that stand out to them consistently, even what they think of your business name. People spend so much on logos and business name inc. before they had any feedback.

There’s an old tale from back in the 1960s that talks about GM and Toyota partnering to make a car called the Chevy Nova which sold decently all over the world with the exception in some spanish speaking countries. Their people couldn’t understand why, but some theorist believe it’s because of the cars name. “No Va” in Spanish means “No Go" in conversational language can be said together, fast, with accents however.... but the idea is the locals stayed away from the car do it being known as a bad car, or the car that doesn’t go. I can see this happening simply because people are funny. For years Ford in my household meant “Fix Or Repair Daily” so for years my family stayed away from Fords though I really only knew a couple people ever having an issue with their cars before.

That little colloquialism impacted my view of what Ford produces until I went looking for a car on my own and test drove one - nice cars.

This was back in the 60s so some of the details may be missing from the story but that is too close for comfort. Even if you just changed the name of the car in Spanish speaking countries a survey of the potential consumer or focus group would have been able to catch something like that.

Exercise:

Think of some of the questions you may want feedback from your perspective audience, prospects, buyers.

If you see any commonalities within the answers then that is the direction you want to head towards or stray away from depending on positive or negative.

But never want to assume you know your customer. You can have an ideal customer, who you’ve created the product or service for. But he market is ever changing and the ideal customer is the one that buys.

SURVEYING THE LAND

This is important to understand the reach of your business, where will you make the most impact, who are the surrounding competitors or people with similar product, services, and resources.

There’s always a David and there’s always a Goliath. Unless you have something proprietary that will improve upon and existing product (Facebook, Google) or flat out changes society and introduces a game changer to people with ease (Yahoo, Bitcoin, etc.)

But for most - it is about taking some of pre-existing market share from another business. And for that knowing the market is essential.

Become a client of your competition if that’s possible. Walk into their store, call them over the phone, look up reviews on them. Find out what people are saying. Know what they do well, learn what they don’t do well. You can even add them in with your survey of the people to see if they are recognizable.

When you realize what the competition is winning at that helps you see what an expected standard is. When you see what the competition is bad at that helps you highlight those areas for your business and place them as a focus to be exceptional in them.

In 2017 there was a study to see the most successful fast food chains McDonalds was number 1, in case anybody didn’t know that.

But it’s really not even close they earned around $36 Billion in total revenue, the next closest competitor in the fast food burger industry was Wendy’s with around $10 Billion in total earnings.

I figured we all have eaten at these places at least once but if not try them out.... think back to your experience at both of them. Now ask yourself what could Wendy’s do to match the $36 Billion that McDonalds earns.

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