When starting a small business, we have overwhelming thoughts covering a wide range of emotions, from excitement to doubts.
The business thoughts come from some idea, or we may not have an idea yet, or we’re looking around on the Internet to see what is available for ideas, costs and how to start a business.
Our idea, with our SEO WordPress Service, is that we first look at what we want to base the business on.
One such approach, and in most cases this is the seed – we want to make money first and foremost and we look at ways to maximize making money from our invested energies.
There is another completely different way to look at online business ideas.
Liking What You Do
For instance, when you start a business you get to choose the specialty, and you get to seek out liking what you do. Below we, SEO WordPress Service, presents a case where you decide and wrap your specialty into a small business based on liking what you do.
Below we explore the business, its inception, from various things to look out for.
Introducing Small Business Costs And Ideas
Preferably Liking What You Do
From the many things to consider when starting a business, from startup costs, monthly budget, whether you require a business loan, what type of business you would want, would you need a team of people in the beginning, or whether you as the owner on your own would suffice, let’s explore the following:
- Consideration 1: Starting A Small Business
- Consideration 2: Ideas For A Small Business
- Consideration 3: Costs Of An Online Small Business
- Conclusion
Takeaway
When setting out to start a small business, where do you start?
You have a range of emotions, from being overwhelmed to excitement to doubts.
These are all part and parcel of a business in its infancy.
In this article, we present a case where you decide and wrap your specialty into a business as a way of earning from liking what you do.
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Consideration 1: Starting A Small Business
Starting a small business requires careful consideration of many things, known and unknown.
Questions like what is a small business and what is considered a small business, are often asked.
Let’s look at what is considered a business before continuing. It could be based on the number of people, sales value, income, and what the business does.
In contrast, when is it clearly not a small business.
It is not a small business when it has a turnover of a few million USD per month, or when it employs several hundred or thousands of people. Small business classification and definition varies from country to country – there is no clear view.
Your approach may be that you want to start a business, no matter what, and that as you go you would address whatever hurdles present themselves.
A cautious approach is to draw up a business plan, do an impact analysis, cost breakdown, income streams, income statement, and expense budget.
It does not matter which approach you follow, without or with a plan, things are never going to materialize as you envisage. For starters, your costs are going to be higher than expected or budgeted. And your income is going to be less than anticipated.
Your plans are not always going to work out when you start a business. Besides, with a rigid plan, creativity is smothered.
When looking at established and successful companies, they may spend 10 years on prototyping. In your small business, you are just not going to have the budget to do that.
The very first thing on your agenda should be to create an income stream.
One aspect when quoting for work is that we tend to quote too low to get the work and then justify to ourselves why the costs are higher than the income.
Above reminds me of the story about children who should not go near the water until they are able to swim, or which comes first the chicken or the egg. Without orders in our order book, our business can’t survive. Some orders may not be profitable, however, if this is the norm and a conscious decision, then you better have deep pockets.
What do you do when actioning any step of your business activity and it fails? How many times would you be able to sustain yourself and your business with successive failures?
Do you give up when a step you implement does not work out? The best way forward is to dig deep, regroup, and redo the step, this time actioning it differently. These are demoralizing and motivating scenarios.
It is liberating and empowering when you are pursuing your specialty that is based on liking what you do. It provides stamina and endurance when starting and running a business.
Contrary to what I write above, laying the foundation of your business to achieve its first sale, followed by successive profitable sales, should be your first and highest priority.
As the individual steps are successfully implemented you gain confidence in what you have set out to achieve. When you fail to implement a step successfully, rest assured that it won’t be the last time. When steps are realistically sized; in time, cost, and expectation, fewer steps would fail. With each successful step, as mentioned, your confidence grows.
See it this way, with unrealistic expectations on the majority of steps, you would feed into the failing self-fulfilling prophecy whereas, when steps are realistically sized, with realistic expectations and costs your confidence grows due to the successful self-fulfilling prophecy.
These approaches affect your experience when you start a business.
Takeaway
What is a small business, how do we determine this?
Some people would say it is important to know what categorizes a small business. Does it make a difference what size our business is, whether small or not?
Does what we want to achieve with our business not overshadow the classification or definition.
When you are liking what you do, your business may start out and stay small, or you grow it as big as what suits your temperament.
Remember when you are unrealistic more steps are going to fail. With realistically sized steps, more would succeed, thereby you grow your confidence with a success-based self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Consideration 2: Ideas For A Small Business
When searching the Internet, and when asking around, ideas abound, whether they are small-town business ideas, small business ideas, or business ideas.
Each of these is based on one of at least two approaches.
One approach is based on making money:
- The business ideas are based on how you make money.
- And, how the company presenting their idea would make money from you going with their business ideas.
Our approach and idea as touched on at the beginning of the article:
- The business idea is based on liking what you do.
When looking at the small-town business ideas and small business ideas, there may be legitimate and good ideas amongst them. Some or all may be based on sound offerings. Their focus though is sure to be diametrically opposed to what we propose.
When you contemplate finding an original idea from your daydreaming, from your heart, from your instinct, from your specialty, talents, temperament, why not develop your business around liking what you do.
When you select your original idea, you are mostly on your own. You would need to determine every step, every process, every activity, and for each do your research and continuously make decisions when presented with options, hurdles, and crossroads.
As you proceed with this process, rest assured, you are giving birth to your business from your own ingenuity, from liking what you do.
Some aspects that would be wholly up to your own research and understanding are:
- Costs
- Create a website, website hosting, and would we provide live chat?
- Organic traffic and online advertising
- Small business administration sba
- Understanding search engines and search results
- Balance sheet
The aforementioned is merely touching the surface, the list is far from exhaustive.
Takeaway
When you contemplate a small business and looking for small business ideas, or when considering opening a business in a small town and looking for small-town business ideas, remember they are usually based on what someone else is proposing or drawing your attention to.
Our proposal is to find your own idea, from your daydreaming, your talents, temperament, specialty, and from liking what you do.
Someone else’s business ideas and offerings may be safe, proven, and come with a working plan and roadmap.
Also, consider starting your business with your own idea. You may be in a position and space to contemplate starting your business based on liking what you do, even though the risks are higher and the work and research are multifold more.
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Consideration 3: Costs Of An Online Small Business
This section provides the basis of costs for your consideration. It is not comprehensive or exhaustive, merely a taster or teaser to give you a broader view of certain costs.
Depending on your unique small business choice, you would have specific costs, either during the startup phase, the monthly, and annual costs. The cost items below cover costs and things to know about a business website.Â
Here is a very high-level breakdown of categories of costs for your online business.
- Start-up cost
- Monthly fixed costs
- Monthly varying costs
- Annual varying costs
- Free services that you may want to convert to a premium paid for services
Each of the above categories may include any of the following:
Website presence components and costs:
- Website design and website design costs
- Website development, building your website presence, finding the best website builder for businesses, and how much does a website cost?
- Hosting your website presence, finding the best web host for small businesses. An option to consider for WordPress websites is Flywheel | Managed WordPress Hosting for Designers and …
- When the business gets bigger, an option to consider is Virtual Private Server – VPS hosting, Though VPS hosting is interesting and enticing, this hosting option requires certain skills and requires additional energy and time.
- Content delivery network CDN, like Cloudflare
- Domain registration and renewal
- SMTP, like SMTP2GO service provider for sending emails from your website.
- Website developer tools, with WordPress the choices provided by the WordPress ecosystem, and its developer community make this a good choice.
- Finding the best website builder for WordPress is almost a no brainer, here is an option Divi — The Ultimate WordPress Theme & Visual Page Builder
- Secure Socket Layer SSL service provider
- Support tickets, Like Awesome Support
- Mobile friendly and mobile responsive website
- Use AMP to build great experiences across the webÂ
- Use PayPal as an example to collect payment.
Website presence is a wide-reaching cost item. To save costs, you may want to develop your own website, in which case when considering how much it costs to build a website or how much does it cost to make a website has two very different answers. These options and the free website builder scenario are covered in What Are Easy Options To Successfully Evolve Our Website?
When considering your website, a particular point to consider before deciding on the way forward for the website is, what is your vision for the business, is the website presence always going to be relatively small, or does your business vision include it requiring rich features or high volume traffic? And do you want to have a scalable and extensible website presence from the outset?Â
Home office expenses
- Rent
- Cloud storage
- Email service provider
- Internet broadband (or WiFi) network provider
Website Content
- Graphic designer
- Content writing
- Content editor
- Legalese writing (terms of use, privacy, and confidentiality)
Small Business Promotion and AdvertisingÂ
- SEO and SEM website and content
- Paid search for advertising and marketing
- Brand building and nurturing
- Business marketers service providers
Social Network Nurturing
- Social media management tools like SocialPilot and Recurpost Social media management that is effortless
Visitor and business nurturing
- Customer Relationship Management CRM like ReallySimpleSystem CRM
- Push notification, like OneSignal
- Email marketing like MailPoet Better Email for WordPress-Powered Websites
Small business costs
- Small business bookkeeping or accounting service provider
- Small business administration tools and service provider
- Taxes
Takeaway
When starting a small business the last things we want to know about are the costs. We’d much rather look at the potential income.
Rest assured your spreadsheet is going to dominate your activities during the contemplation phase. As mentioned, the costs on your spreadsheet are going to be too low, and the income too high. Rest assured this is to be expected.
However, when budgeting is less than accurate, it does not help much. The best is to use this opportunity to be accurate and move your emotions aside. This is easier said than done.
Skipping the whole budgeting phase is to be expected, though not advisable.
The excitement of implementing liking what you do is enticing.
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Conclusion
Above is a taster, and serves as the inspiration to consider liking what you do, rather than a comprehensive guide in starting a small business.
The emphasis is looking at your talents, specialty, expertise, temperament, your hobbies, daydreaming to uncover liking what you do.
Here are some of the Frequently Asked Questions on the topic which we cover above, indirectly, by providing what we feel would spark your creativity, ingenuity, and specialty that you have to offer, based on liking what you do:
- How to start a small business?
- How to start a business at home requires several considerations?
- Owning small business
- Small businesses near me
- Starting a small business
- Steps to start a small business
- Small business startup
- Small business to start
- Small business owner
- Women-owned small business
The business thoughts that are sparked from ideas, or when you want to start a business and don’t have any ideas yet, or you’re looking around on the Internet to see what ideas are available, or the related costs of starting a business, with SEO WordPress Service we propose an alternative.
Neither of these approaches is right or wrong, they are merely two different ways to start a business.
One approach is primarily based on making money. The other is based on starting a business primarily based on liking what you do from which you make money.
There is a subtle difference with far-reaching consequences. One consequence is that when you focus only on making money, you may be doing something outside of liking what you do. This approach may even make it difficult to get up in the morning.
Contrast this with liking what you, and you definitely have a first choice reason for getting up in the morning.
Takeaway
Should your small business exist only to make money or would you primarily want to base your business idea on liking what you do?
Whichever reason you base your business on, above are high-level considerations including cost implications.
