WHY IS THIS GUIDE IMPORTANT?

The writers of this series of guides for new business owners are all micro (0-9 employees) business owners themselves. Between us we have started up many businesses and worked with thousands of start-ups and new business owners. We all agree that successfully starting and running your own business is about learning by doing.

So this guide is about preparing to start up with a bias for action not planning. In fact, most business plans are works of fiction and bear no reality to the practice. It is usually a lot tougher to win enough customers with the right offer then prospective business owners anticipate. This is the reason that many business plans are overoptimistic by inflating the income and the earnings of the business owner.

Only when you have buying customers on a regular basis and you truly put together a business plan with the real numbers will you truly be able to make sense of what you need to do and achieve to earn a living in your own business.

That is not to say you shouldn’t prepare to run your own business by drafting a plan of where you think you’ll be going and how you think you’ll get there. This draft plan will save you making costly mistakes and the process of continually rewriting it as you learn from real experiences will save you money, increase your income in the future as well as increase your chances of long-term success.