5 Easy Exercises to Kickoff Your Women-Owned Business
Let me guess.
You’ve been Googling nonstop wondering what steps you need to take and what boxes you need to check as you kick off owning your own business. As a female entrepreneur myself and with over a decade of legal experience to support, here is a simple 5-step process to complete before starting your women-owned business.
1. Foundation: How do you want to structure your business?
Exercise: The type of Business structure you choose really depends on your goals. Do you want your business to be small and local? Do you want to eventually franchise your business and have stockholders?
Think about this part as planning for your future dream business, not what your company will be on day 1 but what it is going to be on day 501 when you are a badass business woman living your dream life. So here is the exercise...Check out the SBA Business Guide and print out the section on comparing business structures. Focus on the Liability and tax columns. Highlight the ones that are most attractive to you. When it comes to liability my simple recommendation is limit your personal liability as much as possible so that if your business gets sued your personal assets are not at risk. Most importantly, do what makes the most sense for the future of your business.
2. Finances: Do you have a budget and will you need a loan?
Exercise: The first question you should ask yourself about your business is how much money do you need to open the business? I have seen businesses opened two ways:
You get the cash and get your house in order and bet on yourself.
You start small and let the $ your business brings in pay for further growth.
The SBA provides a great tool to determine your startup costs and business expenses. The things most business women don't consider in their budget can often be the most costly, including liability, workers comp and business insurances. After going through the business expense calculator you should have a better idea of the capitol you will need to begin.
If you are going to look for an outside source of funding or want to self fund, read through the SBA’s Fund Your Business page to start.
3. Forms: When interacting with your clients do you have the proper forms and contracts to protect yourself and your business?
Exercise: Okay, this is going to seem dark. First, start by writing down a list of all of the possible calamities you could encounter with your business from a simple slip and fall to the entire building burning down. We don't need to go into a rabbit hole with conspiracies of aliens attacking us, but anything that you have actually seen happen to other businesses should be on this list. This is called your list of liabilities. Once you have that list you now know what you need to protect yourself from and what your contracts and forms need to entail.
This is the point when I would encourage you to find an attorney to develop and/or edit forms that you are thinking about using. The financial commitment on the front end will serve to protect you in the future from issues that may arise and could be much more costly. An attorney can explain to you how to limit your liability through contracts and forms.
In addition, if you plan to have employees, creating employment contracts that protect you is an absolute necessity. Although you will always be innocent until proven guilty, for an employee to claim that they were mistreated and file an EEOC claim will cost them zero dollars. For you to simply defend yourself against that claim can cost upwards of 10k in a simple situation.
4. Marketing: How will you differentiate yourself from competitors?
Exercise: Take ten minutes and read this market research & analysis guide from the SBA. Answer the questions provided there regarding demand, market size, economic indicators, location, market saturation, and pricing. After that analysis, ask yourself the questions: How will my business be different? What is my edge? If you can sit and meditate on why you are doing what you are doing, the answer to those questions will usually be clear.
In addition to these basic marketing questions, I love gathering a group of friends together (providing wine of course) and picking their brain about ideas they may have in marketing your business.
5. Resources: What resources do you have at your fingertips that can help you to get your business up and running?
Exercise: Write a list of the people in your life you are close to. Simple enough, right? Next write next to each of their names one question you could ask them that can help you in your business planning or growth. Over the next week, call those people and discuss your questions with them.
Often we don’t ask the people who are in our inner circle for help. This happens for many reasons, fear of failure being top among mine. What I have found is that you just have to walk through the discomfort because the people in your circle want to support you. This has been a game changing exercise for me and I hope it is for you too.
So get started!
My hope is that the information above can create some forward movement for each of you as you enter into the amazing, frightening and empowering world of running your own business. If you have any further questions, reach out. I'm always happy to direct people to resources or fill in the gaps where I can.