There is no one specific way to start an organized business enterprise but there are standard and acceptable paths to follow that are legally and economically viable. Below are some of those paths:
1. Networking/Relationship/Mentorship/Advisory Board: it all depends on how you understand it and on which one you can apply to your particular business adventures. You must relate and network with fellow entrepreneurs as well as those who have become successful in business (mentors) and experts in various areas of business expertise as official or unofficial advisers (masterminds) to stay updated and informed with the latest.
2. Record Keeping: it is a mandatory habit you must form. Business management thrives on records. A very important record is your finance and account record.
3. Register a business name or incorporate your business at the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC): This gives your business both legal identity status and legal hedge (or protection). As an incorporated business, for example, your liabilities are limited only to your equity or shares/monetary investment in that business. However, there are other investments by you such as all the sweats, tears and times you invested all through the ideation to formative days that cannot be easily quantified in money. These should be taken into account as far as your equity in the business is concerned.
3. Financial Discipline: An entrepreneur must be able to see money and keep his sanity. Every penny must go into running and maintaining the business. Get a bank account. Never yield to the temptation that the money will not quickly finish when large money comes into the business. Many entrepreneurs go into spending spree in the name of rewarding their long labours. Before they realize it they have overstepped the boundaries by overspending.
4. Place yourself under salary as a staff: any money you take for your personal use from the business must be regarded as salary advance (I.O.U) and must be deducted from your salary at month end. You have no right to any money other than from your salary and dividends. And you do not take dividend in advance the way you take salary in advance.
5. Know the difference between salary and dividend: salary is what you are paid as a staff monthly. Dividend is what you are paid annually from the profit the business makes according to your shares or share capital in the business even as the owner. There are other shareholders who should earn dividends, too, with you. They are private shareholders and must earn dividends (according to their private shares in the business.
This is in the case of Limited Liability Company. But as a venture or enterprise (that is, sole-proprietorship or one man-business as they are often called in our part of the world) you should try your best to run that small or micro business as if it is a limited liability company, because that is where you should be heading to. One day very soon that venture or enterprise should become incorporated.
6. Draw a line between business money and personal money: Do not use business money to run your private affairs. Your car is not part of your business assets. Do not use the business money to run it. Use your salary instead. Company or business vehicle must be run by company or the business. Personal affairs must be run by personal money.
7. Have investment mentality: Increase your asset, reduce your liability. Design your business to take interest in other assets outside of the business such as buying other business shares, investing in real estate and other passive income generating businesses such as intellectual properties etc.
8. Build your system and structure from the beginning and keep expanding and improving it as the business grows:do not start a business you cannot build structures and system around. You must not let your business tie you to it. You must design your business system so it can operate even in your absence.
9. Packaging: rightly package your business right from your complimentary card, letter headed paper, logo, brochure/profile etc and climaxing at your products, services and customer care and sales delivery. While your corporate colour, logo, website, brochures etc are great form of packaging, your service will finally determine if those were merely cosmetics and glitz.
10. Competitions: keep tabs on them. Watch out for their weaknesses and cash in on them. Work hard on your own short-coming to beat their strong points. Concentrate on your own edge over them. There must be something about your business that your competitor lacks. Harp seriously on it and protect it.
11. Cost: consider cost in all your doings. If the cost (financially and/or otherwise) of something will impact on your clients / customers negatively, do not embark on such thing unless there is long term/future overall benefit.
12. Knowledge and skill: without relevant and up-to-date knowledge about the business and the industry you are playing in, it will be easy and predictably likely to lose one’s capital in no time. Appropriate knowledge and relevant skills act as protective shield around your capital. Leverage on the advice, expertise and experiences of others. As the saying goes, “information is the commodity of kings”. Business emperors trade in information and knowledge. Information is an integral building block of business empires.
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