Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2019 i Entrepreneur's Startups

Many people believe starting a business is a mysterious process. They know they want to start a one, but they don’t know the first steps to take. In this chapter, you’re going to find out whether a business idea you already have is a viable one. But before we get started, let’s clear up one point: People always wonder if this is a good time to start their business. The fact is, there’s never a bad time to launch a business. It’s obvious why it’s smart to launch in strong economic times. People have money and are looking for ways to spend it. But launching in tough or uncertain economic times can be just as smart. If you do your homework, presumably there’s a need for the business you’re starting.…

Miko Branch is the cofounder and CEO of a multimillion-dollar curly-hair product line called Miss Jessie’s, for women who, like Branch, want to wear their hair naturally. But when she started out 20 years ago, she wasn’t thinking about making products. She just loved working with hair, so she opened a salon. It failed quickly—and yet set her up for future success. STEP 1 Learn from the past. After hair school, Branch and her sister, Titi, opened a two-chair salon in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood—and then, eager to grow, moved into a larger space without the clientele to support it. “We experienced failure within two years,” Branch says. So they took it as a lesson. They opened a new salon, kept it small, and decided to be more methodical this…

Does all work and no play make entrepreneurship no fun? Some entrepreneurs who run part-time businesses based on hobbies, such as crafts or cooking, find that going full-time takes all the fun out of the venture. “Going full-time turns an adventure into a job,” as business expert Arnold Sanow puts it. Some entrepreneurs have trouble grasping the fact that their businesses aren’t just pastimes anymore. They can’t work at their leisure any longer, and their ventures may require them to develop talents they didn’t know they had and perform tasks they’d rather leave to someone else. Don’t get so caught up in the creative aspects of the venture that you lose sight of the business responsibilities you must assume to make your startup succeed. Take a realistic look at what…

GUY FIERI Chef, TV personality, Donkey Sauce maker Have a great relationship with your attorney before you need to,” says Guy Fieri. “And with your accountant—don’t wait till you’re sitting in the middle of all kinds of questions to try to understand how your accounting system works.” This isn’t how Fieri talks on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, or on any other of his Emmy-winning TV shows. You won’t hear him like this if, on some lucky night, you happen to catch him at one of his more than 60 restaurants (he does pop in!), dishing out the most bewitching condiment to ever grace a sandwich, his signature Donkey Sauce. But Fieri didn’t become a celebrity chef superstar phenomenon—a career that now also includes running a winery and authoring a shelf-load…

Think franchising can’t be affordable? Think again. While there are plenty of franchises that cost millions of dollars to get off the ground, there are also plenty of opportunities across a wide variety of industries that require much lower investment levels. So, if you’re interested in starting your own business but don’t have a lot to spend, check out our lists of the top-ranked franchises that can be started for less than $50,000, less than $100,000, and less than $150,000. These franchises are ranked based on the scores they received in Entrepreneur’s 2019 Franchise 500 ranking, a comprehensive analysis of more than 150 data points in the areas of costs and fees, size and growth, franchisee support, brand strength, and financial strength and stability. A company’s placement within a particular…

So you’ve got an idea for a business already worked out. But is it a good, viable one? The answer might seem complicated, but there are a few markers that will tip you off, according to Neil Petch, chairman of Virtugroup, a holding company that supports startups from their early days to market entry. It solves a problem. Solving a problem means delivering a solution that makes a sizable number of people’s lives easier. The problem doesn’t have to be one that nobody else is tackling; it can just as easily be a problem no one has dealt with effectively. It’s scalable. Scalability is the potential of your business opportunity to grow and be applied to an ever-increasing market. Think about whether you can expand on your idea, make it…

MOZIAH BRIDGES, 17 Founder and creative director, Mo’s Bows Moziah Bridges has always appreciated good style. As a 9-year-old in Memphis, he’d ride his bike around the neighborhood in a suit and tie. He loved the unique and unusual, especially bow ties, but could never find them in the patterns and designs he desired. He asked his grandmother to teach him to sew, and Mo’s Bows was born. “Originally, I didn’t sell the bow ties. I was trading them for, like, bags of chips,” Bridges says. But orders kept coming in, and he finally started charging in cash rather than snacks. Since 2011, Bridges has notched nearly $700,000 in sales, appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank, and signed a one-year licensing deal with the NBA to create signature bow ties for…

While many entrepreneurs are still opening brick-and-mortar operations, some are choosing to start part-time online companies. DIY-style sites like Etsy allow people in creative fields to launch without the commitment of their own online store. And eBay remains a platform for those in retail to set up shop online (exclusively or otherwise). Setting up an online order-based business—or any business for that matter—that you intend to run part-time can be a quick, easy, and less costly way to begin. But it isn’t necessarily less time-intensive. For instance, if you start an Etsy shop and one day hope to turn your organic cotton T-shirt business into a full-time venture, you’ll need to spend time on marketing your shop, perfecting your search engine optimization, and regularly adding and creating new products to…

Anyone who has left a regular salary for the startup life knows this: Suddenly you need a crash course in (yikes—cash flow? marketing?) just about everything. “[They] wear a lot of hats and are always looking to how they can get a leg up,” says Wade Foster, who works with a lot of them through Zapier, the tool he cofounded that lets you connect your apps and automate workflow every which time-zapping way. But which apps should you have in the first place? Zapier, which integrates with more than 1,300 of them, crunched the numbers for Entrepreneur to find the ones used the most in 2018. Not surprisingly, the biggies, like Google Docs, Slack, and Zoom, all rose to the top. But here are the top five lesser-known apps—ones that…

For as long as he could remember, Nick Moyneur had fantasized about launching a company. But by 2014, at age 31, he saw no clear way to do it. Moyneur had just concluded six years in the Navy, and he felt disoriented without the regimented military direction he’d been used to. He was also now married, with two young children to care for, and betting the house on an unproven business idea was a nonstarter. “I was going over ideas for a couple of years, and my wife kept shooting them down,” he says. “It was too much risk for her.” And, he admits, she was right. At a loss for what to do next, Moyneur took to Google. He began searching terms like “business opportunities for veterans,” which eventually…

Marketing funnels are the various paths potential customers travel on to reach their destination: buying from you. Each potential customer enters the funnel from a different point of product awareness and then continues along the path, intersecting with other paths of potential customers. Along the way through the funnel, you need to engage these potential customers and drive them to the next step so they move down into the neck of the funnel toward conversion. Some will get to the goal sooner than others. But continuing to engage customers in some way is essential to keeping them on the path through the funnel—no matter how slow the journey. A classic funnel is the AIDA model: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. Let’s take a closer look at each and dive into…

Complete the following self-assessment worksheet as honestly as you can. Just write down whatever comes to mind; don’t overthink the exercise. Most likely, your first response will be your best. Once you’ve finished the exercise, look for patterns (i.e., is there a need for a business doing one of the things you like or are good at?). List at least five things you like to do or are good at: List five things you are not good at or you don’t like to do: List three products or services that would make your personal life better: List three products or services that would make your business life better: When people ask what you do, what’s your answer? (LIST ONE OCCUPATION OR WHATEVER MAINLY OCCUPIES YOUR WEEK.) List five things you…

Should you start your business part-time or full-time? Even if you ultimately plan to go full-time, many entrepreneurs and experts say starting part-time can be a good idea. Starting part-time offers several advantages. It reduces your risk because you can rely on income and benefits from your full-time job. Starting part-time also allows your business to grow gradually. “Starting part-time is simply the best way,” contends Philip Holland, author of How to Start a Business Without Quitting Your Job. “You find out what running a business requires while limiting your liability if it fails.” Yet the part-time path not without its own dangers and disadvantages. Starting part-time leaves you with time to market your business, strategize, and build a clientele. Since you won’t be available to answer calls or solve…

Solopreneur isn’t a brand-new term, but it has definitely become more relevant in recent years. The word is easily interchanged with the word entrepreneur, but there are distinct differences. As an increasing number of professionals choose to start a business with no intention of ever adding staff, solopreneur is likely a term that will only grow in popularity. The differences between solopreneurs and entrepreneurs can be subtle. Here’s a quick look: Solopreneurs don’t wait for a buyout. An entrepreneur works hard to build a business but may not be as attached to the concept as a solopreneur. Many, but not all, entrepreneurs build their businesses with at least a small hope that a much larger company will come along and offer millions of dollars for it once it grows. Of…

Raj and Veenu Parkash are seasoned business owners. After they married, in the ’90s, they owned and operated a garment business in Manhattan while raising their young family in the New Jersey suburbs. But after eight years of that, they wanted a way to work closer to their kids—which is why they became franchisees of an East Coast–based early childhood education center called Lightbridge Academy. Despite their past experience, launching this business felt like starting from square one. The two longtime entrepreneurs tell us how they hit reset on their careers, learned the ins and outs of an unfamiliar industry, and earned the hard-won trust of their community’s parents. What attracted you to Lightbridge Academy, coming from the garment industry? RAJ: Our daughter was actually enrolled in Lightbridge Academy in…