How to Create Your Own Personal Business
Chapter 10
Launch
Once you have everything ‘in place’ its time to ‘launch’ your business fully – to ‘open for business’ at the level you intend to operate initially, full time or part time.
There are two ways to launch – you can do it quietly and build up the level of business over a defined period of time, or you can adopt the ‘big bang’ approach with some sort of launch event.
Both ways, it just depends on the nature of your business which is the best way. Observe what other businesses who are offering similar benefits do – find out how it was for them, and act accordingly.
‘Launch’ is one of the highest ‘risk points’ for your business. I’ve seen businesses who have ‘messed up’ the launch process in some way go on to ‘fail’ very quickly. You should take advice from a business mentor or coach or just ask fellow business owners at a networking group before planning and taking ‘the plunge’!
However you decide to launch your business you must first make sure you have sufficient capacity for the influx of clients. That may be enough time or capacity to provide your services or enough product if that’s included in what you do. You don’t really want to have to put people on a ‘waiting list’ so this should influence how you launch.
Think everything through and take advice and this will significantly reduce your startup risk. Above all make sure you have enough ‘time’ and ‘space’ to take on this new venture efficiently alongside everything else that you do – including family life!
Pre-Launch
It may be a good plan, depending on the nature of your business and your offering to provide the purchaser benefit, to conduct some ‘pre-launch’ activities.
These could include some pre-launch or ‘early bird’ special offers to not only test the market but also to test the service you are offering so that you can ‘tweak’ it a bit if necessary.
In the same way you could offer free trials before launch maybe with an ongoing purchase built in. Free trials are usually better for something tangible like a product but for services of any sort you could offer a ‘test drive’ for people to try out what you do.
This may lead to a purchase decision at the end or, depending what it is and how its delivered, an understanding that they will pay for the benefit received, or an up-front nominal payment for the experience. You should take this ‘test drive’ approach for anything that involves your personal time in delivering it.
Understanding pre-launch activities usually leads to some sort of modification or improvement in how your offering is delivered and also often has the benefit of you discovering other needs and wants that your purchaser may be looking to fulfil – allowing you to perhaps create an augmented or ‘premium’ product or service so that as time goes on after launch you can add different or extended benefits to your portfolio and further develop your relationship with your purchasers.
Next Steps
This book has essentially been about what you need to do to create your business and get it off the ground. There has been some of the ‘how’ in here but by no means all of it and there is a key reason for this.
You can only achieve a certain level of understanding by reading about whatever you are interested in, in this case creating and starting your own personal business.
We learn best and achieve most by ‘doing’, which is why I have created a comprehensive system of further development for you.
This is offered in two ways.
First, there are a series of workbooks which you can wok through by yourself or with some coaching assistance as we’ve found with this sort of thing that many people find it ‘difficult’ in some way to do this work alone.
But that’s all ‘on paper’. It gives you lots of insights, but it isn’t ‘real’ – so we have developed the online Personal Business Creation System which takes you step by step, through everything you need to do including things like registering your company and domain names, setting up emails and websites, developing email marketing, setting up financial tracking and forecasting and much, much more.
On top of this it connects you with some highly trusted and highly competent people, who you might not otherwise find, who can provide you with services such a logo design and branding advice, accountancy, legal advice, software tools, SEO and much more at fair and reasonable prices to protect you from the rip-off merchants that abound in this sector.
On top of that you’ll be invited to join our special online business networking group so you can communicate with other like-minded new business owners and maybe mutually benefit from what they have to offer.