ENTREPRENEURIAL

PROCESS
Here Are The 5 Critical Stages You
Will Go Through As An Entrepreneur:
1). Finding The Right Business Idea
• Choosing just any small business idea to start up is an
entire no-no.
• You must do a market research.
• You must also look at your inner talents.
• Do it with passion.
2). Developing the business plan

• The next step is to make a business plan that suits you

best.
• As a startup, you could write down a few points to target,
as a basic plan, and make adjustments from there.
 3). Raising Your Seed Funding

• You could raise seed funding by getting an

investment from angel investors, grants, a bank loan,
small business loans, micro-finance banks and
professional money lenders.
• Ask help from successful entrepreneurs how to
contact them.
• The best way to raise working capital for any
business idea is usually from family and friends.
4). Getting Paying Customers

• Your goal should be to acquire as many customers

as possible, at the lowest cost possible, and do
everything to retain them in the most efficient way
possible.
5). Success Or Maybe Failure

• If the business fails, take a step back and revisit the

events that led to its failure.
• Highlight what went wrong and what worked. Identify
what you could do better if given a second chance, and
never beat up yourself about its closure.
• As your business grows, highlight your big wins, small
wins, and losses.
• Focus on how to make more customers happy, how to
flush out the losses completely, and above all else, don’t
hide your success tips, mentor some else to increase
their chances of succeeding in whatever they’re doing.
How To Do Market Research
For Any Business Idea
• The problem with coming up with business ideas isn’t
in the idea itself, but in somehow quantifying not just
the number of people who may need that product or
service, not just the number of people that would
eventually use the product, but how best to convert the
bulk of your prospects into actual paying customers.
 So Why Is Market Research Important?
• You need to run your business idea through a
series of market research elements to ensure
you’re on the right track.
Here Are 7 Ways To Do Market Research
• ) Interviews:
• This mostly involves talking to people face to face or
over the phone.
• 2). Surveys:
• Carrying out surveys online or via mail, is a way to
get people’s reaction to your product or service on a
large scale, which would subsequently be reanalysed
to determine what they may rather respond to or not.
• 3). Questionnaires:
• While questionnaires may seem similar to surveys,
they’re not. Surveys are a general view, examination, or a
description. It’s majorly the experience of a group of
people, based on a series of information. While
questionnaires are a series of printed questions, usually
with a choice of answers, sometimes online.
• Using questionnaires for your market research in say, a
university, can get you some partially true answers
from people about their thoughts on your product or
service.
• 4). Focus Groups:
• This involves gathering a small number of
prospects, customers, and even off-
product consumers to get their contained
feedback on your business idea.
• 5). Social Media:
• The advent of social media has done nothing but increase the
market-reach potential for any marketer or brand expert looking
to carry out some detailed market research on a business idea.
• Through social media, you could pose questions directly to
groups of people to get their immediate reply. You could maybe
post the link of your new website or product page to a group
page on Facebook or LinkedIn, asking for feedbacks. With the
activity level of individuals in groups lately, especially
LinkedIn groups, you’d more likely get some results.
• Harness the power of social media in your market analysis to
maximise your result potential.
• 6). Free Market Data:
• Free market data are usually information based off of
already done research lying around the internet, a library,
or some facility to be picked up. Some government
institutions, private companies, university researchers,
and more, carry out detailed market research, and put
their findings on the internet for people to learn from.
• These market research reports can help you gather more
intense findings that’d help you quantify how viable
your business idea truly is, in its proposed launch
community.
• 7). Market Research Companies:
• Another great but expensive route is to use market
research companies to test the viability or non-viability
of your business idea.
• Market research firms can use more intense
methodologies like neuroscience for instance, to
determine how people’s brains react to the sight, sound,
smell, or touch of your new product or service.
• Working with a market research firm to test your idea
doesn’t just give you more confident results, but greatly
reduces the market research process for you personally.
Key Questions To Answer From Your
Market Research
• 1). Does Your Business Idea Solve Any Real
Problem?
• If your market analysis shows you that your
business idea doesn’t solve any real problems of
people in your intended local community
experience, then you must immediately either
change the business idea, or you try another
community.
• 2). Is it a ‘general’ problem, or is it specific to
a particular type of people?
• How wide is the potential size of the market for
your business idea? Is it global? National? Or
really small?
• If the size of the market does not have the
potential to sustain the business for a long-term
profitable and massive growth, then you should
find something else to do.
• 3). Are your test audience really honest about
their feedbacks?
• Are you testing your family and friends, or the
right people? Are their responses genuine?
• Testing the right audience is totally important to
the success or failure of your market research.
You must ensure you test only those that have no
personal or emotional connection to you, for
optimal results.
• 4). Are there any related problems you could solve?
• In the course of carrying out your market research, did
you realise any related problems that the prospects
need solutions too? A business idea gets even more
lucrative if it opens up related opportunities. If you
realise there are none, there’s no need to panic.
• If the idea already proves itself from the market
analysis, then it could be a good bet. After you’ve
started out, you may more easily spot related problems
better than you initially did or didn’t.
Common Market Research Problems
• 1). Biased Surveys:
• Some surveys can be rendered unproductive, due to
the level of bias put into it.
• Marketers may create a survey about a certain
product, but make the questions be more inline to the
natural characteristics of a particular type of people,
when the survey was supposed to cover as many
kinds of people as possible.
• 2). Poor Survey Design:
• When a market survey is not properly organised for a
thorough market analysis to be effectively carried out,
most of the results would be total fallouts.
• For example, a market research company may organise
a market survey for kids who sleep during a class
lecture, but run it through all the kids in the school. The
problem with this survey is that a lot of the wrong kids
that don’t qualify would take part in this, and end up
making the results practically worthless.
• 3). Nonresponse To A Survey:
• Even after preparing a perfect market survey for a
test, people may still not respond to it. While this is a
problem, it’s important you master your emotions.
Take a few steps back, identify what the problems
are, adjust, then try again.
• When things don’t workout the first time, you
haven’t failed. You only found a way that doesn’t
work.
• 4). Relying Only On Published Works:
• Relying only on third party research work opens you
up to many problems. You could either be basing
your analysis on what worked in an entirely different
market, or on a research that is greatly flawed.
• Carrying out your own market research would give
you the most accurate results possible. This is
important because you don’t just control the
research, but you also ensure that it adheres to highly
accurate and strict standards.
• 5). Basing Your Research Only On The Web:
• The web may be a great resource for market research
reports and market analysis to be carried out, but it is not
enough to show if consumers really want your products and
services. Every successful market research always has a
good physical element to it.
• Watch how people respond to your business idea, ask
questions and get live feedback, have neuroscience help
you better determine what people want that they’re not even
aware of. As long as you’re detailed enough and carry out
all the best market research methodologies, your report will
produce accurate results.
• Final Words
• Don’t let the excitement of a new business idea
cloud your judgement, that you then avoid the
market research process. While there are success
stories of entrepreneurs who founded companies
out of business ideas that were based on a hunch
and not rational facts, doing a good market
research before you spend a dime on your business
idea, would save your potential future investments
from going down the drain.
• “It’s better to be safe, than sorry”.
How To Write A Business Plan:
The Complete Guide
• What Is A Business Plan?
• A business plan is a professional document that also
acts as a road map that provides a well-researched
direction for any business to plan its future and
avoid problems along the way.
• Any business plan is usually a well-written
professional document that shows a clear picture of
the business in view and provides great clarity for
the entrepreneur or financial expert reviewing the
document to enable them to have an in-depth
understanding of the business model, its viability,
and what it takes to succeed in the business.
Why You Need A Business Plan
• When a business plan is well-written and prepared by
either an experienced entrepreneur or a world-class
professional that serves as a great guide that when kept
up-to-date, thorough, and accurate can be a great
investment that would pay great dividends on the long-
term.
• Highly-effective professional business plans that
produce great results secure finance from banks,
investors, and other financial institutions by always
conforming to generally accepted world-class
guidelines in the form and content of the business plan.
• Writing a business plan will help you achieve
your entrepreneurial goals easier.
• It will give you a clear and concise path to
follow through the course of your business
execution and will keep you focused on your
target.
• Irrespective of achieving your entrepreneurial
goals, having a business plan can be a great
element to securing a bank loan and getting
funding from an investor. 
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