How to Start Your Own Business

Nicholas Meyer:

It's not hard to see the allure of starting your own business. In 2021, 44% of freelancers reported they earned more by working for themselves than they did with a traditional job. I've experienced this myself. My media business brings in five times more profit per year than my last day job salary paid me, and my newly spun up agency business achieved its first five-figure revenue month in its third month of operation. But starting a business is confusing even for those who have done it before.

So in today's video, we'll go through how to start a business in four steps. Step one is the most obvious but the most difficult part of starting your business, finding the right business idea. To do this, you should tap into the Japanese concept of Ikigai. Ikigai means a reason for being. It's the intersection of what we love, what we are good at, what the world needs, and what we can be rewarded for.

Finding something you love is important because it gives your work meaning and provides you with motivation to keep pushing forward during the bumpy parts of your business journey. If you're good at something, you can gather testimonials from happy clients and charge more for your services. Finding something the world needs is what many entrepreneurs miss. If your total addressable market is small, it doesn't matter how good your product or service – it'll be hard to make much money. And finding something you can be rewarded for means that your clients or customers see enough value in your solution to pay you money for it, which is obviously pretty important in business.

To give you an example, my ikigai is creating personal finance content on social media. Personal finance is a passion of mine, so I was okay making content for months without a financial reward while my business was ramping up. I spent four years as a financial advisor and earned the CFP certification, so I've developed a level of skill and expertise here. Most Americans aren't taught anything about personal finance in school, so they need the information in my videos. And advertisers are willing to pay hefty sums of money to get in front of the audience I've curated, so I can make a pretty good living doing this.

Take a second to write down every potential idea that pops into your head when you think about your potential. To help spur some thoughts, here are some of the highest paying freelance jobs. We have AI engineering, programming, data analysis, web design, editing, and public relations. If any of those speak to you, think about how you can package that offering into a business that'd be valuable to your ideal customer.

Step two may be the least fun but most essential part of starting a business, setting up all the business essentials. Start by making a business plan, which is a document that clearly lays out your goals and a path for achieving them. Since you'll learn a lot from actually doing business, everything in here will be subject to change, but it's a great idea to start off your business with a clear vision of who your target audience is, your main competitors, your company's value proposition, and roles for everyone in the company.

Next up is one of the most creatively challenging tasks of starting a business, choosing a name and creating a logo. I personally like my business' purpose to be obvious from their names. When you see @NickTalksMoney on social media, it's obvious what kind of content you expect to see on that page. My other business is N2 Content Marketing, which helps financial services brands with, you guessed it, content marketing. This is just my preference though and there are plenty of examples in the other direction like Apple or Nvidia where companies with big names have had great success.

Logos are something I almost always outsource on Upwork. Why would I spend my limited time using my level zero design skills to make the image every single one of my prospective customers will see instead of outsourcing this work to a talented designer that can turn around a batch of high quality designs in a couple days.

One of your biggest responsibilities as a business owner is knowing when to outsource certain tasks, and logo design is one that I recommend every business owner outsources unless you're running your own logo design firm and want to showcase your design shops. Upwork is my go to website for outsourcing. Just look at all the different categories you can find talent in.

And finally, you'll want to consult with legal, insurance, and tax professionals to determine business structure, how to properly protect yourself with insurance, and what records you need to keep so tax season isn't an absolute nightmare for you.

Step number three is when the fun of being a business owner really starts, establishing and growing your business.

The first thing I wanna do is establish an online presence. Build a website. Note, Upwork has thousands of web design specialists. Create social media pages. And if you're providing services that are offered on Upwork, building a portfolio on Upwork could be your fastest way to finding your first customer. Upwork has tools to help you find your clients, communicate with clients, and get paid on time.

Speaking of someone who has hired talent from Upwork before, the communication and payment processes are seamless and much easier than the scanner process I've used when hiring other talent. Keeping track of communications on multiple different apps and managing invoices across different platforms is not the most fun thing in the world. And as your business grows, you can build a team of subcontractors on Upwork or even start an agency.

If you become really good at sourcing clients for your web design business, for example, it's feasible that you reach a point where the best use of your time is acquiring new customers, not actually designing websites. To give you an example of how this could work, you could collect payments from your customers, subcontract or hire proven web talent from Upwork to fulfill your customers' web design requests, pay your web designer talent their typical fees, and pocket the difference.

By leveraging Upwork's talent network, the number of clients you could potentially serve at once goes through the roof. For example, instead of only being able to serve, like, five clients at once if you're handling all the design work yourself, you could potentially serve 50 clients at once by bringing on additional subcontractors to complete the work for you.

Congrats. You officially started and are growing a business. Step 4 covers best business practices to ensure your ship sales as smooth as possible from here on out.

To continue to attract new customers, it's important to gather testimonials from existing and past customers. Testimonials are simply a review of your services, but they're essential to running a business because they provide what's called social proof. Have you ever read reviews of products before you bought them? And if you needed to hire a plumber, would you hire one without reading the reviews of every plumber in your area?

That's why testimonials are so important. They tell prospective customers how good or bad an experience current past customers have had with you. Upwork makes it easy to gather testimonials and display past work if the stuff you're making for clients isn't confidential.

Now that you know the four steps of starting a business, it's time for you to do the hardest step of them all, actually taking action and getting started. Thankfully, we live in a time where it's easier than ever to start a business and acquire your first customer. Don't forget to subscribe for more tips and tricks from Upwork.