Building Blocks: Essential Steps to Kickstart Your Business

Starting a business can be an intimidating endeavor. The thought of venturing into the unknown and taking on new responsibilities can often feel overwhelming. However, this journey can become more manageable with the proper knowledge and guidance.

Understanding the different types of businesses and where to begin is crucial in navigating this exciting path. You can determine which structure best suits your goals and aspirations by familiarizing yourself with various business models, such as sole proprietorships, partnerships, or corporations.

Additionally, knowing where to start is critical to laying a solid foundation for your business. Conducting market research, identifying your target audience, and developing a comprehensive business plan are essential steps in setting yourself up for success.

Remember that starting a business is not about conquering all fears at once but taking small steps toward your vision. With perseverance and determination, you can overcome any challenges that come your way on this entrepreneurial journey.

Transcript

 Welcome to the Off Balance podcast, where faith, family and business collide with your host, Dr. Brooks Demming, Christian Life coach, intercessor and entrepreneur. 11s Hello, everyone. I'm Dr. Brooks. Welcome to Off Balance, a podcast for adults trying to balance life. Thank you for tuning in each week to learn strategies to help you be the better version of yourself. 1s Dr. Brooks here. Welcome to Off Balance. I am so excited. Many of you may not know, but I am a certified master of life coach and a part of my coaching practice. I actually work with entrepreneurs to help them kind of navigate entrepreneurship and to make sure that their business is set up in a legal way in order for them to be able to focus on the business and not worry about the legalities of it. And so today what I am going to do is I am going to talk about the types of businesses that you can start as well as just making sure that you are properly registered with your state. You have your eye in, you have your domain, website, email account, all of that great stuff. Because not only is, you know, starting your business important, but also you want to make sure that you as legit as possible. And a lot of the times I think people don't understand the importance of having a system in place. So your customers, with their purchasing a service or a good from you, they can feel protected. I don't think people realize that having a legit email address that ends in.com org something to that nature is more professional than Google, Gmail, Yahoo! And so we're just going to talk about that. So I am excited. So just stay tuned and we are going to get started with what you need to do. If you are interested in entrepreneurship, what type of business do I want to start? There are so many types of businesses. You have a sole proprietorship, which is a business that's owned and operated by a single person. The owner is personally responsible for all aspects of the business, including debts and liabilities. And then you have a corporation which is a legal entity that is separate from its owners. You can look at this as more like shareholders. Corporations are for limited liability protection to shareholders and can raise capital by issuing stocks. So a corporation is a more complex structure. And they are also subject to different regulations. So you can start a corporation if you want. The next one is a partnership, which is a business structure where two or more individuals or entities share ownership and responsibilities. Partnerships can be general, where partners share in the profit and the losses or limited, where some partners have limited liability. So if you're interested in a partnership, you really need to, you know, research that to make sure that that is something that you want to do. And then the most popular type of business, of course, is a limited liability. The limited liability simply means that the assets of the owner and its members are protected from the business debts and liabilities. 1s However, there are some companies that if you want to do business credit, then they make you do a personal guarantee. But if you are a person that's trying to separate your business from your personal, then I would only deal with organizations that don't want a personal guarantee, because a personal guarantee then makes you, as the owner of the limited liability company responsible for those debts. And so, in other words, if an LLC faces any type of financial difficulties or legal issues, the personal assets of the members such as like your house, your savings, anything that you own is not at risk. And so a lot of people do start LLCs, but you just have to do your research to see what type of company IT structure best suits your needs. 1s And so once you figure out, okay, the industry that you want to be in and then the type of business structure that you want, the next thing that you're going to do is you're going to have to figure out, okay, do I want to have an actual physical location for my business? Do I want to operate my business online? Or, you know, is this going to be a business that I operate out of my home? And the reason why this is so important because when you register your business with the secretary of the state, they ask you for an address. And so a lot of people register their business with their home address. You have some people that get you know, they'll get a virtual address and then you have some people that will actually get a lease where they have a physical place for their business. So prior to registering with your secretary of the state, I would definitely recommend figuring out what address you want on file because this will become public information. And so if you don't want your home address being linked to your business, I would definitely say get a virtual address or get you a physical location. It depends on what your needs are. And there are so many organizations and companies that offer virtual addresses. You can also do 1s office sharing where you can rent an office space within a building. It's just up to you what your needs are. So that's something that you would need to consider. So once you consider that, you're going to go to the secretary of the state website for your state and you're going to register your business, once you register your business, the next website you would go to is the IRS website and you're going to apply for in applying for a and it's completely free. I see a lot of commercials and advertisements of people charging for things, people even charging you to register your LLC. It is something that is so simple and easy to do. I would suggest doing it yourself, but if you're just uncomfortable, you can pay someone, but it's really not necessary. And so after you register with the secretary of state and you get your eye in, the next thing you want to do is register your domain name and get a business email address. A lot of people will get their business going and they don't get their website. And so when they think about getting their website, the domain name can be taken or not available. So you just want to make sure that you go ahead and secure your domain name and email address. Some people do this first. Some people have this be their first step before they even register with the state. They go check to see if the business name is available and then they'll go and go ahead and purchase their domain. Either way, just make sure that you get your domain and your email address because that's very important. You want to have a domain as well as a professional email address because you don't want to use, you know, Gmail, Google, Yahoo! Or anything of that nature because you want people to know that you are a legitimate business. And a lot of us, a lot of the times people are more comfortable, you know, doing business with legitimate business businesses that appear to be legitimate, not saying that a legitimate business cannot scam you. But what I'm saying is it looks more professional. And then after you do that, you want to head on over to Dunes and Bradstreet. Dunes and Bradstreet is actually a data universal numbering system. And so what it does is it assigns your business a nine digit series of numbers. And that series, it basically generates a business profile for you. It identifies your company's name, phone number, address, the number of workers, the type of business that you're operating. And this is used in order to establish like business credit for your business. And so a lot of times when companies are looking to see if you are high risk or whatever about your business, they see if you have a dooms number. And so you would definitely want to register with Duns and Bradstreet. And then after you do that, you want to make sure that you get a business checking account. You always want to keep your business and your personal separated, so you want to get your business checking account. You can go into any of your local banks. You could do some of the online banking systems. There are so many companies that offer business checking accounts, so you want to make sure that you get a business checking account. And then after you get your business checking account, you want to begin to build business credit. And the easiest way to do this is through the use of net 30 trade line accounts. So a net 30 account is an account that extends you 30 days to pay your bill in full. So basically you you purchase and then you pay later. And so if you are a company that maybe does t shirts or if you are a company that does administrative work and you use a lot of paper, ink, printers, things of that nature, then you can get 1s a net 30 account. Some of the popular ones for t shirt companies is business t shirt club. For some of the companies that do administrative work. You have Office Gardner, you have Quill Granger, you line Staples, you have Office Depot, Amazon, Best Buy. There are so many companies that will give net 30 accounts to businesses. And so you just want to make sure that you're not using your personal money and you want to try to get some type of business credit going in order to help you with your office supplies as well as your business supplies. So that's something that you would want to research and look into and just make sure whatever type of business you build and whatever type of credit you build, that you have the money to pay it back because you don't want your business credit to be bad. You want to be a company that you know sticks with your agreements and you pay these companies back on time. So make sure you look into net 30 accounts, straight line accounts. They're very, very good. 1s Another thing that you want to consider is business point of sale system. 1s Today. There are so many people that use cash app. Nothing against cash out, even though they have a business side that is not professional. A lot of people will stray away from conducting business with people because of Cash App. Cash App has no type of guarantee for the purchaser, and so you want to make sure that your customers feel safe with doing business with you. And they want some type of assurance that if you don't come through with what you promised and they have a way of at least getting their money back or getting a refund or whatever the case is. And so you want to use a point of sale system that gives them the option to be able to dispute that, gives them the option to have some type of security, you know, from the system being hacked. And so you want to definitely look into a point of sale system. Some of the common ones are Stripe square. Glover Some people use PayPal. It just depends on what your business needs are. But you definitely want to use a point of sale system that offers the customer some type of assurance that if something happens with the sale, then they have a way to be able to request their money back. You also want to make sure that you have some type of 1s legality on your website that talks about if you offer refunds, if you offer returns, exchanges, depending on what type of business you have, you want to have your rules out there. A lot of people use 1s websites like. 2s Like the different attorney websites to do their terms and conditions for their website. So you could definitely Google terms and conditions. And then there are different legal websites that you can pay a couple of dollars and and they will populate the terms and conditions for you because you definitely want that on your website. You definitely want to be protected on your website when it comes to exchanges, returns, refunds. And then another thing that you want to do is you want to get business insurance. There are so many people that don't have insurance for their business, but business insurance is very important. Even though the likelihood of you getting sued, maybe 1%, you still want that protection. So Google business insurance and find a company that's very affordable and get coverage in the event that a lawsuit is brought against your business. And then the next thing you want to do is you want to register your business with Google or Yelp or both. I'm just to make sure that you have that online presence. So, you know, you've already created your website and now you're going to register your business so that when people Google, you know, whatever it is that that market that you're in, your business will come up. And so you just want to make sure that you register your business and then you want to build a social media presence for your business. Choose one of the platforms and just, you know, build your brand on that platform. You don't have to feel pressured to be on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. 1s You can just choose one platform and just really make sure that you brand your business on that particular platform. And then after you build your social media presence, you want to get some type of email text marketing for your business. You can do constant contact, MailChimp, HubSpot, it's so many different marketing platforms that you can use to send out like emails, text messages to your customers because on your website you want to have a landing page that get people to register, you know, get people to subscribe so that you can build your customers and build your your clientele. And so it's just very important. Entrepreneurship can can definitely be hard work, but it's rewarding work. And so. I hope all of the things that I shared here today will be beneficial to you. I just know that there are so many different areas of business and in so many things that I didn't know when I first started. And so I make it my business to help people, just to lead them in the right direction. You want to make sure that you are having some type of tracking system for your your, your taxes on your business. And so that's why that point of sale system is so important. It consolidates, you know, your taxes, your tracking and one particular location where you would be able to track your sales, your taxes and all of that stuff. And so that's why the POS is very important. A lot of people use Shopify as their website because Shopify does have an e-commerce and it tracks your taxes and all of that, but you have to find a website in the domain platform that works best for your business. Shopify doesn't work for all businesses and so just do the research. I know it can seem tedious to to have the research, the market tedious to have the research, what works best for your business. But I can assure you that the research will save you money because. It will prevent you from getting a domain on a website that doesn't support your vision. And then you've paid hundreds of dollars. Now you have to switch to another website and it would just save you money. I can remember when I first started my online boutique, I went with one website and that platform did not partner with other points of sales and so my customers was limited to how they can pay me. I wasn't able to use the, you know, the for payment methods or they, you know, allowing them to essentially layaway the products. And so I had to switch and that cost me money. And so basically, if I would have done research, I would have known up front the best platform to use for the type of business that I had. And so I just want to encourage you do your research. I know the research may seem like it's a waste of time, but in the end it's not. And so I just want to encourage all of you entrepreneurs don't give up. Sometimes you will have good sale months, sometimes you may not, Sometimes you may have customers knocking down your door, sometimes you may not. But guess what? It is. Okay. There are seasons in business where sometimes you'll do really good, sometimes not so great. You have some people that do great all the time, but it's not a cakewalk. And so I just want to encourage you to keep going. I want to encourage you to invest in yourself and always try to learn. About the business, you know, just learn what you can and offer good customer service. Because at the end of the day, if you treat people well, they would treat you well and you would be able to build that brand, that brand loyalty, you would be able to build, you know, those customers that they don't care about paying just a little bit more because they know that you're going to take care of them. They know that you're bringing is a brand that can be trusted. And so I just want to encourage you be the best entrepreneur that you can be. It's not going to always be easy, but it will be worth it. And so thank you so much for tuning in. If you need any help with your business, if you are entrepreneur, I do offer business coaching. I work with entrepreneurs to help them to overcome adversity, to be able to navigate the uncertainties of business. And so you can visit my website, Brookstone, Mi.com for more information. Again, thank you so much for tuning in and I hope this episode offered you insight into entrepreneurship if you're in it or if you're considering it. I hope that I gave you the tools that you would need just to get started. 1s This concludes today's episode. Thank you for tuning in. I hope the information presented adds value to your life. Be sure to follow me on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube at Brooks Deming. The sponsor of today's episode was closed by Jay Christine, a Christian clothing store offering quality and affordable clothing for the everyday, fashionable, conscious woman. To learn more about today's guests, visit Brooks Demming. Until next time, be resilient. 4s Thanks for joining. Please rate this episode and share this podcast with your family and friends to learn more about your host visit. 2s Brooks Deming.