Venturing into the business jungle…

...which way next??

Hailed as ‘without doubt the biggest step that you will take on your journey towards self employment‘, I recently booked myself onto a Thursday evening Business Awareness seminar held at the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. The seminar programmed by the BCT Business Venture Scheme is ‘a chance to hear what the experts in business start-up have to say‘.

The first thing that John Kilcoyne, our expert for the evening, asked all of us to do was briefly introduce ourselves to the group one by one and say what our business idea was. There was a very broad range of ideas from personal fitness trainer to wig maker, and cake making to selling handmade vases from recycled materials.

John revelled in telling us that none of the ideas were unique enough to not have been used as the basis for a business before. Where we were all heading to was an already crowded marketplace. If we were going to carve a niche for ourselves we would need to swot up on the concept of wealth creation, familiar to all entrepreneurs.

There was a lot to ponder and some of John’s anecdotes were very thought provoking (such as the experiences of Anita Roddick when she set up The Body Shop) and kept me going for the 3 hour seminar after a long day at work.

I got home from the seminar and wrote myself a quick action plan checklist:

1. Call the tax office to register self – employed
2. Set up a transactions records system for income and expenditure plus somewhere to store receipts. (Records of transactions need to be stored, saved, kept for 5 years for tax purposes. Note: I’ll need a secure Ikea style storage solution!)
3. Start preparing a business plan, cash flow forecast, and marketing strategy – including a timeline with dates allocated to activity. There are templates for these online including loads of useful stuff at www.percyemmett.com for instance.
4. Take advantage of one to one business advice sessions (i.e appointment with Marion Taggart at the exchange)
5. Get business cards

Feel free to share your top tips for setting up in business in the comments below. I’d also be interested to hear about obstacles others are facing and things to avoid/watch out for…

Lauren