Startup- 5 Step Action Plan for Entrepreneurs!

“It’s all about the priorities along with the ‘Will’, how faithful and dedicated a person is, defines the intensity of success in a startup” 

Starting up a venture or initiating something on your own gives immense pleasure and the feeling of satisfaction. Whether it is successful or not successful, but yes! It gives the strength to the character of a person. The startup leader wears many different hats to perform variety of jobs and in the end he is a skilled man, who is different from the 90% crowd who haven’t even tried.

It takes determination with fortitude to leave a well paying job to pursue the dreams and taking risk to start a venture. These people are unique in themselves and have their own kind of respect in the minds of people around them. Some of these brave people have shared their views and experiences for those who are on their way to become an entrepreneur, let us have a look on it.

1. Research, Research and more Research : 

If you are about to or have already left your job, then you would have already set the eyes on some problem or an opportunity that you want to address. But even before you write a line of business plan or code make sure you spend considerable amounts of time to validate your idea. Talking to your expected target audience, your customers and stakeholders, and conducting on-ground research definitely deserves top priority, instead of jumping headfirst into building a product, or a deck for that matter.

As a startup, you will encounter many barriers and challenges, and the only way around them is to know your stuff- better than anyone else. Unbiased information from candid potential customers and users will either give you further validation or help you alter some of your visions accordingly. Either way, it’s a win-win situation.

2. Dividing the Ultimate Purpose into actionable goals, with deadlines:

The thing to remember is that you are now in the driver’s seat- so drive responsibly!  It is not like the corporate job, where we expect the manager to draw up a vision . Creating a vision is our own responsibility here, also the vision(ultimate purpose) needs to be broken down into realistic goals along with a deadline to keep a watch on ourselves.

Building a ‘plan of action’ document with resource allocations and deadlines is the key to effectively building and running a business. The action items need to be realistic and should be achievable with your existing or future team. For the progress of startup, the target dates are considerably important to ensure the unnecessary energy and resources exhaustion.

3. Focus on Sales:

‘Constantly work on building relationships and the sales revenue will automatically improve.’

It can be all too easy to get stuck in a romantic view of the business when one is doing what he/she loves, forgetting the fact that it also needs to be profitable. Every single day, the focus must be there to generate the revenues. The founders must not ignore this fact at least till the time they are not having a sales team, even if they have a sales team, they are the “Chief Convincing Officer”. 

4. Don’t over-burn, or it will burn your startup:

Make sure not to succumb to worldly desires during this whole period because it will only put you in an unpleasant situation later on. No matter how much money you have in the bank- always think efficient and effective. Get an old aircon or laptop even if it has a few months of life left, instead of buying new ones; and make sure never to waste any energy/electricity. Never block capital.

5. Don’t be hasty:

You must learn not to rush things, because success takes time. Patience and determination is extremely important. Don’t drive too fast thinking it will make the road shorter. Feeling pressured into doing things too fast is what should be avoided at all times. Endure and persevere, because if you simply hurry things, it will impact negatively on the work. Ironically, if you push things too soon it may only take you farther away from your goals.

To sum up, if one approaches this path sensibly, responsibly and maturely, starting up can be a priceless experience. Unfortunately, it can’t be learnt sitting in a classroom or enrolling in an online entrepreneurship course.

Hard work pays off all the time, so no matter what your next day or week throws at you, don’t ever give up hope. Leave no stone unturned and keeping pushing hard to see your vision transform into reality. There will be days that will leave you unnerved, but then take a moment to remember the dream you had, long before all this happened, and stay true to it. Trust yourself, it will work !

Keep going ! All the best !