One of the most important decisions you will have to make when starting a business is where to locate it. Should your business lease or buy premises? Is it feasible to work from home? The following factors need to be considered when starting a business: look at the demographics of the area you are planning on operating in; check out the local competition; evaluate your supply chain; assess the property price in relation to your budget; determine if any local laws may affect you; evaluate how effective the location is for future growth; and so on.
Furthermore, if you lease your business premises, you will have to monitor your financials and your contract. GASB 87 lease accounting standards might require you to record your rented assets and capital on your balance sheet and eliminate non-operating resources. In order to make the process easier, you can opt for a GASB 87 software that can effectively document data for you. This is just the beginning of all your plans, if I am being honest!
Now that you have identified a market to get into with an idea you have and decided to go ahead with your start-up along with all your financial planning, you might have to brace yourself for a challenging journey ahead. Whenever you embark on this business journey, it is advisable to consider two major factors. Firstly, you may need to learn about business operations and functioning. To accomplish that, you can take advantage of a business mentorship program (check out this site https://lacollide.com/mm-saas-with-chance-abdul/ for more info on such a program), which can help you understand the way of doing business, to make your journey easier and smoother. Secondly, you’ve come to the right place if you’re looking for ways through which to fund your start-up, simply because here you’re reading the content of someone who has some practical experience in the financial sector.
So what are your options as far as funding goes?
It perhaps goes without saying that you have to have your story together, no matter which funding route you choose to pursue, so even though we all know by now that something like a business plan will probably dynamically evolve over time, this very important documentation of your plans acts as a standard requirement. This is your blue-print you’re going to use to achieve the ultimate goal of any start-up, which is to reach a stage where it generates profit.
Sure, sure, as a start-up entrepreneur you are on a mission to solve one or more identified problems, but you’re not looking to do so for free, are you? You’re not running a charity and you have to eat first of all, and secondly if you’re going to dedicate the next bit of your life to getting a venture off the ground then you want to enjoy some very juicy fruits of all that labour, don’t you?
Grants
There are a few sources from whence to get a grant to fund your start-up, but it’s not at all easy. Grants are great because essentially you’re being given the capital you need to get your start-up going with no expectation of paying anything back once you start making a profit. Some of the best grants you can get come from the government, such as a Research and Development grant, mostly because in addition to being given money to get your business going, the same government which funded you commits to buying the product or service produced. That’s why governments fund certain start-ups – they identify them as the possible creators of a solution which they need and do not have the expertise to produce themselves.
Crowd-funding
Crowd-sourcing the capital you need to fund your start-up is becoming increasingly popular as an alternative to traditional capital-raising routes, with many platforms providing these channels through which you can appeal to the general public to pledge what are essentially donations that will add up to the capital you’ll need to get going. Often just a sample of your product or service will be enough compensation for the crowd-funding contributors, or a mere mention of them as contributors.
Business loan
Coming from the heart of the financial industry, I would probably know exactly what I’m talking about when I say that a business loan is perhaps one of the last places you’d want to look to fund your start-up. Banks don’t take risks so they tend to focus on approving business loans for proven business models, but on the other hand if your start up gets approved for a bank loan then it means an entire bank believes it has the potential to succeed. Fret not, because even if a bank does not approve your loan, there are still other places you can go to. Business funding from private lenders, which are most likely to be unsecured loans, can also be obtained. Providers like L3 Funding help small businesses get off the ground with such options, so you can look at this page if that’s a route you want to take.
VC funding and angel investments
If you’re in the start-up phase then getting the required capital injection to get the show on the road from a Venture Capitalist firm or an angel investor might be the best way through which to get funded because often VCs and angel investors offer their existing business mentorship expertise along with their investments.
Bootstrapping
By no means are these sources of getting funding for your start-up listed in any particular order of preference. It all depends on the unique situation your start-up finds itself in, for example if building your product or service won’t require much in the way of capital, you can bootstrap, much like how many tech startups proceed. If you can’t code for example, then you’d probably proceed to hire some programmers, which is where some of the capital you’d need would be directed to.
Presented by Innovatis Group – association management company