All You Need To Know About Entrepreneurial Process: The Complete Analysis
When I look at how people rush into starting a business or becoming an entrepreneur, I laugh at certain things they do. Of course, you are free to make mistakes and correct them later but what if you knew the entrepreneurial process and avoid certain mistakes?
That should be great I believe. Well, except you like a hard life. You can go on suffering.
Life majorly is about principles and processes. You can have some days that things don’t need to follow certain principles but things must generally go along with principles.
So, to go become a great entrepreneur with a track record of success, you need to follow the stages in the entrepreneurial process.
Let me not waste your time. Really, I would have loved to show some other things but let me just do very little in terms of volume and much in terms of quantity.
Related: The 3 vacations entrepreneurs must take
So, we will be talking about steps in the entrepreneurial process. But before we go into doing that, I did like to show you what entrepreneurial process is. I promise to be as concise as possible.
About Entrepreneurial Process
Because of the danger that could come from sounding too academic in an entrepreneurship discourse, I will like to take our explanation on the process of entrepreneurship as lightly as possible. Trust me, I won’t bore you. I don’t even want to bore myself.
This is quite simple; you can refer to the entrepreneurial process or entrepreneurship process as those stages that must happen for a business to get started.
Also Read: Debunking the myths of entrepreneurship
It is not about what is said, it is about what it is done. To kick start your business, you must go through the stages in the entrepreneurial process. It is not a wholesome exercise; it is developed one step at a time.
In a nutshell, the entrepreneurial process should be understood as the set of procedures and methodologies that have to be followed by all entrepreneurs in their bid to establish a new venture or business.
You will need to follow the process of entrepreneurship development as they all hold specific importance in your success as an entrepreneur.
Let us now take a look at the entrepreneurship process and how they should be developed. The takeaway is that you will learn the importance of the entrepreneurial process.
The Stages In Entrepreneurial Process
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Developing the right idea
Every successful business is a product of a great idea. If you understand this, then you did know that identifying and evaluating the ideas and the opportunities accruing to them is necessary for your path as an entrepreneur.
Every idea has to solve a problem before you can work on it. So, do you pick any idea in your entrepreneurial process? That is a definite no.
So, take out time to run market research to understand the needs of people or you did just be wasting your time.
No matter how attractive and interesting business opportunity is, if you don’t have the capacity to execute it, it will fail. This likely event is an important reason you must ensure the business is something you are passionate about.
Imagine the life of most programmers. They are lazy at doing house chores and any other physical activity. Can they excel in a home cleaning and renovation company? That will be a great disaster.
Even if the clients are many and waiting for them, it still doesn’t change much. Most of them wouldn’t just fail; they did also feel unfulfilled every step of the way.
Another important thing to do when coming up with a business idea is to try to sell to an individual you’ve identified as a potential customer, without having a single product or service in hand.
Related: Top 10 lucrative business ideas for people that hate selling
If someone is willing to pay for what they cannot see, this doesn’t just show you that there’s a pressing need they’d gladly part their money for, but that you’ve got a business idea that can fly.
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Do you have a business plan? Get one
You did be fooling yourself and getting out of the entrepreneurial process stages if you bypass a business plan. So, once the idea is formed and it is good, work on getting a business plan.
You will need a business plan that suits your idea the most. Once the opportunity is identified, an entrepreneur needs to create a comprehensive business plan. A business plan is critical to the success of any new venture since it acts as a benchmark and the evaluation criteria to see if the organization is moving towards its set goals.
Related: How to write a business plan in Nigeria
An entrepreneur must dedicate his sufficient time towards its creation, the major components of a business plan are mission and vision statement, goals and objectives, capital requirement, a description of products and services, etc.
Usually, when you start a new business no one has ever tried before, what you draft as a business plan would probably go down the toilet in a week or two because whatever way you anticipated the market to react would most likely never happen.
At this point, light tests, corrections, and re-tests wouldn’t just help your business succeed but would help you make a business plan poised for growth.
There are so many reasons you need a business plan. I did like to show you all of them in details but you can get it here. Sounds okay right? I can see the dissatisfaction on your face.
Okay, you need the plan to grow your business, access funds, make necessary adjustments, and determine growth and other necessary ingredients you will find in the link above.
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Resourcing (raising seed funding)
In your stages of entrepreneurship, you will find out that when you have an idea that is scalable and you have put up a great plan, you will need to work on funding.
How do you get your seed money? Because you now have a full understanding of the financial implication of your project, you can answer that question.
To raise seed money, you can look at personal funding, money from investors and venture capitalists, loans from banks and other financial institutions or any other source you may deem fit. If you have to beg to start a business, I don’t know what to tell you.
This is the part that will give you Goosebumps. People find it hard to part with their money except it is for a great cause.
If you don’t have anyone making the introductions and your product is not a very appealing one, you will find it difficult to raise funds. Personal funding will always be the easiest.
The best way to raise working capital for any business idea is usually from family and friends. These individuals already trust you and would either invest-in or loan you the money not because they believe in your idea, but because they believe in you.
Some alternatives you could consider for small business loans are micro-finance banks and professional money lenders.
These institutions and individuals can provide you with a line of credit with much more lenient requirements, but can sometimes have higher interest rates and short repayment periods, compared to other larger financial institutions.
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You have money now, Get paying customers
Having secured funding, you will need to work on an important aspect of the entrepreneurial process. This is the fourth stage in the process of entrepreneurship. It is the real deal.
Now, you have a good idea, you have a good business plan and you have been funded. What is very important is that you will never be profitable if you don’t have real paying customers. Everything you are doing boils down to acquiring as many customers as possible as that will enable you to become a successful entrepreneur solving real-time issues.
You also bear in mind that getting these customers is one thing, getting them at the lowest possible cost is even more beautiful and retaining them is yet another thing.
One way you could achieve these objectives is to offer exceptional customer service that no one would believe. A company I know that offers exceptional customer service is sumobank.ng. They are always at alert to attend to customers and to solve issues that will affect customer satisfaction.
Happy customer testimonials build a sense of trust in people who haven’t patronized your business before. Ensure your customer support team wows your customers every single time, and they’d never stop making you money.
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Harvesting (profit or loss, success or failure)
The funny part is that following these stages of entrepreneurial success doesn’t guarantee that you will succeed. You could still fail o succeed. While it is important to succeed, sometimes you fail.
While everyone strives for the latter, it’s important to know that sometimes, your failure isn’t because you didn’t put in your all, but because of other factors like pursuing a business that had no real customers, or doing something that your natural inclination wouldn’t have approved.
It’s important that if your small business fails, you should take a step back and revisit the events that led to its failure. Highlight what went wrong and what worked. Identify what you could do better if given a second chance, and never beat up yourself about its closure.
The entrepreneurial process may result in successes or failures. If your business didn’t pan out well, then you never really failed, but only identified one way that doesn’t work.
The same applies to success. As your business grows, highlight your big wins, small wins, and losses. Focus on how to make more customers happy, how to flush out the losses completely, and above all else, don’t hide your success tips, mentor some else to increase
