Great businesses all started from great ideas, which means yours can too. Coming up with the ides for your business is usually the easy part of the process. But, now that you have that great idea – what now? How do you take that idea and make it a reality? Well, here’s how.

Refine Your Idea

You need to know your business inside and out before you do anything. What is your business, and why is it needed? If you look at any successful company at their core, you’ll see that successful companies solve problems. Uber solved the problem of inconvenient taxi services; Amazon addressed expensive e-commerce. Netflix gave consumers entertainment on their terms.

Who are your consumers? What do they want? Knowing your idea means knowing your target consumers, what they like, and what they want. Ask yourself: what problem is my business solving, and who are we solving it for?

If you know this, you’re on your way to building your business on good foundations.

Create Your Business’ Identity

Who you are as a business is as equally as important as what you do. How you identify the brand and how the consumers see your brand is their first impression of your business, so it’s important to make it a good one.

Brainstorms some names for the business and then cross-check to make sure none of your competitors already have that name, or anything similar enough to confuse consumers. Consider the visual identity of your business; what does your design say about the business? What are the logo and the branding like? Do they make sense with your name, mission and values?

Don’t forget to include your digital presence in this identity. Remember to be consistent when creating your online and social media presence, register your online assets like your domain and your social media accounts and try to keep them all under the same handle.

Create A Business Plan

Your business plan should always be at the heart of your business and is the heart of your business is, what you do and what you stand for. There are a lot of online resources you can consult if you’re not sure where to start with a business plan, but you need one.

It’s where you’ll keep all your plans and goals, and while your business plan should be at the heart of everything you do, it should also be adapted and refined as the business grows.

Start Small & Get Feedback

Once you have all of that in place, it’s time to get some feedback on all of the work you’ve done. You know your business, you know your target audience – now it’s time to put them together.

Start small, source out some ‘testers’ from those around you and give friends and family the first look at your business ideas. Give them a look at your groundwork and give them a trial of your products/service before moving onto a bigger audience.

Just make sure that you’re asking for (and getting) honest and critical feedback.

Secure Finances

Once you’ve got past the initial test phase, it’s time to kick things into gear. You’ll need to set up your finances with the help of legal guidelines and government bodies. Set out a budget and make sure to account for everything. You’ll have fixed costs to consider, such as start-up costs to consider, insurance, location costs, staff, sales and marketing and equipment.

Get Going

Once you’ve got all of this base work done, it’s time to get out there and get selling. It’ll take a lot of hard work, but once you’ve put in the effort behind the scenes, you should state seeing the results coming.