Tips for New Business Owners

By Peter Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 18, 2010

A reader requested that I provide some thoughts directed at individuals who are just getting started with their own businesses. Here is some important advice for new business owners.

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1. Make sure that you do everything necessary to legally operate your business and to limit your liability. Incorporating your business will limit your personal liability. Secure special licenses required for your type of business (if any). Acquire insurance policies as necessary (liability, workers compensation, errors and omissions, etc.).
2. Define what accomplishment/success means for you in your business, in quantifiable terms. Create clearly stated goals based on this definition. Generate a business plan that outlines how you plan to meet your goals and achieve success.
3. Create a goals for your personal time management, make a schedule, and do your best to stick to it. Many new business fail because the owner is unable to properly manage his/her own time.
4. Don’t wait to figure out your bookkeeping. Learn how to keep your books properly, and get the system set up before you become busy. Many small business are uncertain of their current financial status due to ineffective bookkeeping. This inhibits confident decision-making. In addition, poor tax planning can be murderous to a business.
5. Many new businesses fail, for a large variety of reasons. Particularly if others are dependent on you, your business plan should include risk assessment and an exit strategy. If you don’t have an exit strategy, then you haven’t defined the line past which “enough is enough”, and you need to cut your losses and move on.

I hope that this article provides some beneficial information. Please contact me if you have any further questions.

Peter Mirus is a business, marketing, and technology consultant with more than 20 years of experience working with companies and nonprofits, ranging from start-ups to large international organizations. From 2004-2014 he contributed articles on the Catholic Faith, culture, and business to the CatholicCulture.org website.

Show 2 Comments? (Hidden)Hide Comments

• Posted by: Dennis Olden - Sep. 25, 2019 4:50 PM ET USA

  After years of listening to exhortations to think about our ritual prayers, I have decided that there's another way to pray them: as background without forcing them through the rational mind. Then, instead of suppressing wandering thoughts, attend to them, think of them as part of a prayerful conversation with God and be open to His responses to them.

• Posted by: james-w-anderson8230 - Sep. 25, 2019 3:11 PM ET USA

  Thanks Phil, I will pass this on to my friends.