What to consider when starting a business
I guess you have been thinking about venturing into the business world and you must have been thinking about how viable your idea is in terms of becoming successful in the market. I must commend the courage to consider yourself as an entrepreneur in an ever-competing market in all global economies but your success in the market is not guaranteed by mere courage. You might equally be the hard worker who considers your energy more productive if used to serve in any niche market of your consideration, but such work ethic may not be productive save you consider the position of your service or product in the market and how it relates to people.
Most people begin a business with wrong assumptions, and it is the reason why people fail in business. To think of enhancing your income as the dominating mindset for business, for example, would lead to business failure yet if you do not make a profit from your business then the whole business idea would be futile hence you must think of your end users benefit too. The quality of information you have when initiating your business would either become the strong foundation to build a viable business upon or to build a crumbling business upon. The question then is how do you build the appropriate foundation for a viable business? This is to design your foundation on recognising a gap in the market. Such recognition of the gap is divided between an awareness of a problem or a need. One must however be careful with such observation by taking a conscious effort to differentiate between a problem and a need in a market gap.
Problems usually have a temporary nature such that when a potential businessperson builds a business on it, the life span of the benefits for both the customer and the businessperson may be limited. To take an example to explain this, one could think of the covid-19 pandemic period and consider the viability of venturing into making facemask as high. Even though such item already has providers the likelihood of its success if exploited with the corresponding marketing process is still high but then the issue of Covid-19 was managed out of pandemic status and by that fact the market of facemask was automatically expected to reduce hence your game as an entrepreneur was over except you use that same platform or skill to respond to the next incumbent trend or crisis so that the platform makes you an entrepreneur.
In converse to the paragraph above, a more secured way to establish yourself as an entrepreneur would have been in your prowess for recognising an inalienable need in the life of the people. To focus on the need of the people is very strategic in business initiation as people by nature have an endless list of needs. The inalienable need of the people is borne either out of popular demands or by your understanding of its utility in enhancing the quality of life. People thrive on the consumptions of certain needs that are inseparable to their survival and sense of dignity which any provider of service/products could legitimately exploit strategically in providing. Then there are those needs the people do not think about but when you provide them and demonstrate their utility as valuable, people would embrace it as an unavoidable need in their lives. An instance of the last situation was how life used to be prior to mobile phone and the internet becoming household commodities. Albeit the fact that sustainability of relationship was rare, mobile phones and the internet were considered either non-existent or needless luxuries.
Those items today had become almost another part of human existence such that business is constructed across distant borders regularly. Relationships are now sustained and more promising in such ways that the possession of them is more normal than the non-possession of them so the market for these tools remained under persistent demands. Also, when automobiles came into existence, it was a luxury for the rich, but Henry Ford changed that by conceiving an idea that he would manufacture a collection of cars that people with average income could purchase and that laid the foundation of car possession becoming as essential as we have it today. Initiate your business on responding to a public demand or introduce a valuable need and your business would thrive.
However, you must measure the need before you initiate your project and if you do not have a technical skill to do this, start by considering what is called Human Rights Article in UK, which are divided into qualified and absolute rights. The absolute rights are those rights that are not restricted but must be solicited for as an essential priority of all people and then imagine and work towards a service/product that you consider to be likewise paramount to social existence and do not forget to Consider the following as summary:
1-Be aware of the need of the people and consider the quality of service or product satisfactory if not distinctive as the only viable way to guarantee your return on investment.
2-Find a niche market where possible and grow out of it to other groups by the proof of the customer satisfaction you obtained from your initial audience.
3-Identify the best platform, channel, and location to sell your services or products.
4-Do not forget to make conscious marketing efforts and enhance customer services.
5-Remember Jason Folds Group motto: Persistent innovation and Improvement.
The odds are now in your favour!
'Yemi Daramola
Managing Consultant.
Jason Folds Group
