What drives entrepreneurs? Autonomy? Money? Growth? 

More often than not, it’s actually a problem. Entrepreneurs see an issue that the markets have yet to resolve and take matters into their own hands. The bigger the problem, the more people there are willing to pay to have someone solve it.

For that reason, entrepreneurs are better thought of as problem solvers than strictly as moneymakers. Entrepreneurs of the past turned buggies into cars and landlines into cell phones — these same transformations are happening today, and business leaders need to adopt a problem-solving mindset if they want to achieve that level of potential. 

It may sound simple when put like that, but it can often be difficult to see problems for what they truly are: opportunities. Here are some tips to help you do so.

1. Look at your own life

Take a moment to think about some of the common challenges you face. Anything from getting your cat to go in the litterbox to scoring a big client on the job is fair game. 

Then, ask yourself whether there is an existing solution. If so, is it affordable and accessible? Your experience may not be universal, but you’re unlikely to be the only person facing down these issues. If you can’t find the right solution to a problem in your life, chances are that others are in the same boat as you.

For example, Gabb Wireless CEO Stephen Dalby was struggling to find a safe kids phone for his son. All the available options had too many features, were too expensive, or simply weren’t suited to kids. Instead of settling, he developed one without access to the internet or social media. And as it turned out, lots of other parents were looking for exactly that.

It’s easy to feel passionate about your business idea when it does something personal for you. Getting ideas from problems you yourself face is a great way to tap into that passion.

2. Start a poll

Not all common problems are immediately obvious. If you have ever seen a commercial for a product and thought, “Why didn’t I think of that?” you know that not every person can solve every problem. 

Starting a poll about consumer needs can lead you directly to some common problems. It will also help you validate your business idea, letting you know it’s a good idea to get started. Start by surveying your close circle before branching out to other parts of your network and beyond.

Wall Street trader Rhys Powell came up with a business idea after talking to the parents of school-aged children. He found that there was both a need and desire for affordable and healthy meal options in schools. This prompted him to start a company called Red Rabbit, an organization that now serves over 25,000 meals and snacks every day across a number of schools and Head Start programs.

Powell set to work to fill the need he had discovered by talking to others. You can’t solve a problem until you know it’s there. Thankfully for budding entrepreneurs, people love to talk about their problems.

3. Reach out to family

No problem hits home as hard as one within the family. If one family member is hurting, everyone else can feel it too. While no two families are exactly alike, talking to family members can be a great opportunity to get unfiltered insight from people you trust. 

When Eric Yuan migrated to the United States from China in the 1990s, he was just about as disconnected from his loved ones as he could get. His family couldn’t stand the thought of being on the other side of the world from him, and his girlfriend was a 10-hour train ride away. 

The distance wasn’t just tough on Yuan; it was taking a toll on his family and girlfriend in ways he hadn’t anticipated. The hardship both Yuan and his family underwent led to Yuan coming up with a solution that only he could: Zoom. Thanks to Yuan, millions of families are now able to stay in touch with one another in ways they never could before — all because he started with his own. 

Don’t underestimate the power of family. Parents, siblings, and relatives can provide not just support but also potentially help. If nothing else, appoint them as your first product testers. Your family members will be all too happy to share the good, the bad, and the ugly.

4. Expand on previous solutions

Just because there’s an existing solution to a given problem doesn’t mean that it can’t get better. Entrepreneurs are constantly warned not to “reinvent the wheel,” but that kind of reinvention is why cars today drive on vulcanized rubber rather than rickety wooden wheels. 

Innovation creates room for new companies. Making something better could mean making it more efficient, more accessible, or more affordable — any of which can open it to new markets. In some cases, a new business idea may be able to cover all three of those bases at once. 

One of the most obvious examples of this kind of innovation is Airbnb. Hotels, bed and breakfasts, and house-sharing have been around for decades, but the market for each was fractured and hard to compare. Airbnb gave travelers new options and property owners tools to promote their holdings to customers they’d never encountered before. 

Airbnb doesn’t necessarily offer any new solutions; it simply offers a streamlined way of accessing existing ones. Even the simplest fixes can have huge impacts if they land in just the right spot. And even if they don’t, they may need just a tweak or two to become viable.

There are problems out there waiting to be solved

You don’t have to be a seasoned entrepreneur to know that the world is full of problems waiting to be solved. From Covid-19 to climate change and everything in between, the opportunities are there. 

Entrepreneurs need only a modicum of awareness to see ideas are all around, ripe for the taking. What matters is who acts first, who moves the fastest, and who produces the best results. 

However, it’s going to take more than just passion to launch a successful business. It’ll take time, dedication, planning, and a bit of risk on your part. 

Should you start a business?

As you toy around with the idea of turning your hobby or side hustle into a business, there’s one question you should ask yourself first. Should you start a business?

Typically it’s a question of feasibility, and we’ll cover that in a bit, but when you’re adapting a hobby there is one additional complication to consider. You may no longer enjoy it. The pressure of working to a schedule and meeting financial goals and customer expectations can simply take away the fun, relaxation, and personal satisfaction.

There’s a chance that you end up disliking the activity so much as a business that you never want to do it again. That fundamental change is something you need to be ready for. Think long and hard before taking that step and ask yourself “If this doesn’t work out as a business, could I live with not ever doing it again because I won’t ever feel the same about it?”

If the answer’s no, save yourself some heartache and choose some other way to make a living. If the answer is yes or if you’re unsure, then it’s at least worth exploring what your hobby as a business could look like. To get a full picture of your new entrepreneurial endeavor, you’ll want to follow these ten steps.

10 steps to turn your hobby into a business

1. Set a goal

Simply deciding to turn your hobby into a business isn’t a goal. Of course, you want to be working on something you’re passionate about, but what else do you want from your business? 

Do you intend to quit your day job and run it full-time? Are you just looking for a side hustle? Do you simply want a challenge or even just the freedom to make something on your own?

Ask yourself these questions and determine, outside of passion, what you expect to get out of opening your own business. Having your reasons clearly outlined can help you stay the course and remember why you decided to become an entrepreneur in the first place.

2. Do your research

Many entrepreneurs fall into the trap of being enamored with a product or business idea. Starting with something that you’re passionate about can be even more dangerous. That’s why you need to conduct market research to make sure your business idea isn’t just appealing to you.

This process is simply you learning more about your potential customer. You’re asking questions, looking at the available market, analyzing competitors, and identifying your target market. 

Now don’t get too caught up in this stage, as it can quickly turn into a barrier to ever getting your business out of the idea stage. Just do enough to verify that your idea is well-thought-out and has potential in the market. You’ll likely come back to this step fairly often throughout the life of your business and you shouldn’t worry about perfectly researching every single possibility. 

3. Identify a business model

The second half of doing your research is identifying a business model. It can be really easy to find a problem, have an idea, and jump right into product or brand development. But if you don’t fully understand how you will actually make money, you won’t ever get your business off the ground.

To put it simply you need to know:

• How much it will cost to make your product or service.
• How much it will cost to sell it.
• How much your customer is willing to pay.

You also need to consider how you’ll actually sell the product. Will it be a subscription model? A one-time purchase? Ad-revenue? Franchising, leasing, or maybe even crowdsourcing? 

Find a platform that fits your customer-base, business offering, and pricing strategy. Just be sure whichever model you choose brings in more money than your spending. And to be clear, you can always adjust and adapt as you go, but it’s better to start out on the right foot.

4. Test your idea

You’ve done your research and established a business model, but here’s the issue, all of that is hypothetical. You think there’s an opportunity. You think you know your ideal customer and how to sell to them. But you aren’t sure.

So, before you go full steam ahead you’ll want to validate your idea. You’ve done a bit of this already when asking potential customers questions, but this is where you test if they’ll actually buy it. 

Some ways to do this include: releasing a coming soon landing page, taking preorders, selling a limited run, running a crowdfunding campaign, and even running digital ads. There are plenty of ways to test and your method really depends on your business model.

Now, the key to successfully validate your idea is to set out with metrics of success in mind. Whether it’s a number of newsletter signups, preorder amounts, or conversions on ads, you need to know how much represents success. 

5. Develop a business plan

If you find that your idea does have traction, it’s time to make things official. Writing a business plan helps you put everything you’ve done so far in order and ensures you’re covering all your bases. This is where you put together all of your market research, business goals, operational costs and think about long-term goals and milestones.

You don’t need to worry about putting together a 30+ page business plan and can instead start off with a lean plan. Lean planning is a simpler, more efficient method of business planning that allows your plan to grow and adapt with your business. You’ll still have all of the necessary documents in order if you ever plan on seeking out a loan or pitching to investors, but it takes much less time upfront to get everything together.

If you’re unsure where to start with your business plan, you can download our free lean planning template. Or if you want a streamlined process that takes the guesswork out of building a plan, you may want to consider investing in business planning software such as LivePlan. 

With LivePlan, you get step-by-step instructions as you develop your plan and a long-term solution for maintaining and updating your financials and planning documents. It ensures that you spend more time running your business and less time digging through spreadsheets and word documents.  

6. Get your finances in order

You’ll naturally identify your startup and operational costs throughout the business planning process. But you’ll also need to get the rest of your financial plan in order. The documents included represent a snapshot of your current monetary situation, the health of your business, and any future expectations you’ve forecasted. You’ll need a:

• Profit and loss statement
• Cash flow statement
• Balance sheet
• Sales forecast
• Personnel plan
• Business ratios and break-even analysis

At the start, a full financial plan is valuable for you to keep track of how your business is doing and identify any areas for improvement. Eventually, if you apply for a loan or pitch your business this will be a vital piece to successfully receive funding.

Lastly, you’ll also need to get your personal finances in order. This means understanding your current financial situation, what you can afford for your business, and if your personal credit will affect your business. You’ll likely want to separate your business from your personal finances if you become a full-time business owner, but if it’s initially more of a side-hustle and you’re in good financial standing this may not be necessary. 

7. Learn marketing basics

The potential of your business can quickly die if you’re not reaching your customers. That’s why it’s vital that you do some research and know some marketing basics from the get-go. There are plenty of low-cost offline marketing methods you can consider, as well as digital marketing practices to keep in mind.

At the least, be sure to set up a website and social channels for your business. This gives potential customers an easy focal point that you can feature in both digital and physical marketing material. You also may want to consider running digital ads on Google Search and Facebook, which can be a low-cost method for building a customer base.

The key to successfully marketing your business is iteration and connecting with your customers where they’re at. Don’t just stick with one message, test multiple iterations, and see what converts more. And don’t spend money on tv ads if your customer base is mostly in their early 20s and that money could be better spent marketing to them online. Be willing to try, fail and try again as you narrow down your messaging.

8. Get customers

This may seem like an obvious step, but it’s vital for long-term success. You’ve tested and validated your idea, which may have led to sales, but now it’s time to get your first official customers. These buyers are acquired through the sales and marketing channels you’ve established, and represent everything you’ve planned in action. 

You may find that these customers are a bit more difficult to acquire than your early adopters, but they can also be your best chance at gaining traction. Offer promotional discounts, incentives, and even free services in exchange for reviews and feedback. This initial group serves as your springboard for building an audience and a positive reputation.

Take what you learn as you acquire these customers to grow and refine your business model and marketing efforts. With the right incentives, you can make a name for yourself and work out any initial problems that would deter less interested customers.

9. Set milestones

Milestones are something you’ll need to cover in your business plan, but they aren’t goals that you set in stone. Instead, they should evolve as you operate your business, see results, and adjust your trajectory accordingly. While you likely set milestones to get your business up and running, these later goals should be what you intend to achieve long-term.

And while specific sales, operational, and even funding milestones should be included, you’ll also need to consider professional milestones for yourself. You did turn your hobby into a business after all and you may not be working on your startup full-time. So you should set goals around how long you need to stay at your current job, or how much personal debt you need to pay off in order to invest in your business full-time.

Use these long-term goals as a guiding force to become a successful entrepreneur. They can help inform any short-term actions and ensures that you stay on track without taking any unnecessary risks.

10.  Find a mentor

Now that you’ve gotten your business off the ground it may be time to grow your network and find a business mentor. This is someone who’s gone through the process before and can help guide you through the startup and growth stages. They could be someone in your current network, an old business colleague, part of a local startup community, or even a well-known entrepreneur.

The only thing that you need to keep in mind is that you shouldn’t try and force the mentorship. Instead, it should occur as a natural part of you growing your professional network. Be on the lookout, showcase a willingness to learn, and have your business plan or pitch deck at the ready to showcase how you’re handling a startup.

Be prepared for startup post-partum

If you’ve followed these ten steps there’s a good chance you’ve successfully turned your hobby into a business. Or you may have found through the exploration that your hobby should just stay a hobby. 

Just remember if you did end up creating a business, that the process may sour something that you used to enjoy. And this can be compounded by the natural let down as you fall into the regular cadence of maintaining operations. Just remember this is perfectly natural and there will always be opportunities to grow and experiment that will inject that excitement back in.

Believe it or not, creating a business plan for a nonprofit organization is not that different from planning for a traditional business. 

Nonprofits sometimes shy away from using the words “business planning,” preferring to use terms like “strategic plan” or “operating plan.” But, the fact is that preparing a plan for a for-profit business and a nonprofit organization are actually pretty similar processes. Both types of organizations need to create forecasts for revenue and plan how they’re going to spend the money they bring in. They also need to manage their cash and ensure that they can stay solvent to accomplish their goals.

In this guide, I’ll explain how to create a plan for your organization that will impress your board of directors, facilitate fundraising, and ensures that you deliver on your mission.

Why does a nonprofit need a business plan?

Good business planning is about setting goals, getting everyone on the same page, tracking performance metrics, and improving over time. Even when your goal isn’t to increase profits, you still need to be able to run a fiscally healthy organization.

Business planning creates an opportunity to examine the heart of your mission, the financing you’ll need to bring that mission to fruition, and your plan to sustain your operations into the future.

Nonprofits are also responsible for meeting regularly with a board of directors and reporting on your organization’s finances is a critical part of that meeting. As part of your regular financial review with the board, you can compare your actual results to your financial forecast in your business plan. Are you meeting fundraising goals and keeping spending on track? Is the financial position of the organization where you wanted it to be?

In addition to internal use, a solid business plan can help you court major donors who will be interested in having a deeper understanding of how your organization works and your fiscal health and accountability. And you’ll definitely need a formal business plan if you intend to seek outside funding for capital expenses—it’s required by lenders.

Creating a business plan for your organization is a great way to get your management team or board to connect over your vision, goals, and trajectory. Even just going through the planning process with your colleagues will help you take a step back and get some high-level perspective.

A nonprofit business plan outline

Keep in mind that developing a business plan is an ongoing process. It isn’t about just writing a physical document that is static, but a continually evolving strategy and action plan as your organization progresses over time. It’s essential that you run regular plan review meetings to track your progress against your plan. For most nonprofits, this will coincide with regular reports and meetings with the board of directors.

A nonprofit business plan will include many of the same sections of a standard business plan outline. If you’d like to start simple, you can download our free business plan template as a Word document, and adjust it according to the nonprofit plan outline below.

Executive summary

The executive summary of a nonprofit business plan is typically the first section of the plan to be read, but the last to be written. That’s because this section is a general overview of everything else in the business plan – the overall snapshot of what your vision is for the organization.

Write it as though you might share with a prospective donor, or someone unfamiliar with your organization: avoid internal jargon or acronyms, and write it so that someone who has never heard of you would understand what you’re doing.

Your executive summary should provide a very brief overview of your organization’s mission. It should describe who you serve, how you provide the services that you offer, and how you fundraise. 

If you are putting together a plan to share with potential donors, you should include an overview of what you are asking for and how you intend to use the funds raised.

Opportunity

Start this section of your nonprofit plan by describing the problem that you are solving for your clients or your community at large. Then say how your organization solves the problem.

A great way to present your opportunity is with a positioning statement. Here’s a formula you can use to define your positioning:

For [target market description] who [target market need], [this product] [how it meets the need]. Unlike [key competition], it [most important distinguishing feature].

And here’s an example of a positioning statement using the formula:

For children, ages five to 12 (target market) who are struggling with reading (their need), Tutors Changing Lives (your organization or program name) helps them get up to grade-level reading through a once a week class (your solution).

Unlike the school district’s general after-school homework lab (your state-funded competition), our program specifically helps children learn to read within six months (how you’re different).

Your organization is special or you wouldn’t spend so much time devoted to it. Layout some of the nuts and bolts about what makes it great in this opening section of your business plan. Your nonprofit probably changes lives, changes your community, or maybe even changes the world. Explain how it does this.

This is where you really go into detail about the programs you’re offering. You’ll want to describe how many people you serve and how you serve them.

Target audience

In a for-profit business plan, this section would be used to define your target market. For nonprofit organizations, it’s basically the same thing but framed as who you’re serving with your organization. Who benefits from your services?

Not all organizations have clients that they serve directly, so you might exclude this section if that’s the case. For example, an environmental preservation organization might have a goal of acquiring land to preserve natural habitats. The organization isn’t directly serving individual groups of people and is instead trying to benefit the environment as a whole. 

Similar organizations

Everyone has competition—nonprofits, too. You’re competing with other nonprofits for donor attention and support, and you’re competing with other organizations serving your target population. Even if your program is the only one in your area providing a specific service, you still have competition.

Think about what your prospective clients were doing about their problem (the one your organization is solving) before you came on this scene. If you’re running an after-school tutoring organization, you might be competing with after school sports programs for clients. Even though your organizations have fundamentally different missions.

For many nonprofit organizations, competing for funding is an important issue. You’ll want to use this section of your plan to explain who donors would choose your organization instead of similar organizations for their donations.

Future services and programs

If you’re running a regional nonprofit, do you want to be national in five years? If you’re currently serving children ages two to four, do you want to expand to ages five to 12? Use this section to talk about your long-term goals. 

Just like a traditional business, you’ll benefit by laying out a long-term plan. Not only does it help guide your nonprofit, but it also provides a roadmap for the board as well as potential investors. 

Promotion and outreach strategies

In a for-profit business plan, this section would be about marketing and sales strategies. For nonprofits, you’re going to talk about how you’re going to reach your target client population.

You’ll probably do some combination of:

• Advertising: print and direct mail, television, radio, and so on.
• Public relations: press releases, activities to promote brand awareness, and so on.
• Digital marketing: website, email, blog, social media, and so on.

Similar to the “target audience” section above, you may remove this section if you don’t promote your organization to clients and others who use your services.

Costs and fees

Instead of including a pricing section, a nonprofit business plan should include a costs or fees section.

Talk about how your program is funded, and whether the costs your clients pay are the same for everyone, or based on income level, or something else. If your clients pay less for your service than it costs to run the program, how will you make up the difference?

If you don’t charge for your services and programs, you can state that here or remove this section.

Fundraising sources

Fundraising is critical for most nonprofit organizations. This portion of your business plan will detail who your key fundraising sources are. 

Similar to understanding who your target audience for your services is, you’ll also want to know who your target market is for fundraising. Who are your supporters? What kind of person donates to your organization? Creating a “donor persona” could be a useful exercise to help you reflect on this subject and streamline your fundraising approach. 

You’ll also want to define different tiers of prospective donors and how you plan on connecting with them. You’re probably going to include information about your annual giving program (usually lower-tier donors) and your major gifts program (folks who give larger amounts).

If you’re a private school, for example, you might think of your main target market as alumni who graduated during a certain year, at a certain income level. If you’re building a bequest program to build your endowment, your target market might be a specific population with interest in your cause who is at retirement age.

Do some research. The key here is not to report your target donors as everyone in a 3,000-mile radius with a wallet. The more specific you can be about your prospective donors—their demographics, income level, and interests, the more targeted (and less costly) your outreach can be.

Fundraising activities

How will you reach your donors with your message? Use this section of your business plan to explain how you will market your organization to potential donors and generate revenue.

You might use a combination of direct mail, advertising, and fundraising events. Detail the key activities and programs that you’ll use to reach your donors and raise money.

Strategic alliances and partnerships

Use this section to talk about how you’ll work with other organizations. Maybe you need to use a room in the local public library to run your program for the first year. Maybe your organization provides mental health counselors in local schools, so you partner with your school district.

In some instances, you might also be relying on public health programs like Medicaid to fund your program costs. Mention all those strategic partnerships here, especially if your program would have trouble existing without the partnership.

Milestones and metrics

Without milestones and metrics for your nonprofit, it will be more difficult to execute on your mission. Milestones and metrics are guideposts along the way that are indicators that your program is working and that your organization is healthy.

They might include elements of your fundraising goals—like monthly or quarterly donation goals, or it might be more about your participation metrics. Since most nonprofits working with foundations for grants do complex reporting on some of these, don’t feel like you have to re-write every single goal and metric for your organization here. Think about your bigger goals, and if you need to, include more information in your business plan’s appendix.

If you’re revisiting your plan on a monthly basis, and we recommend that you do, the items here might speak directly to the questions you know your board will ask in your monthly trustee meeting. The point is to avoid surprises by having eyes on your organization’s performance. Having these goals, and being able to change course if you’re not meeting them, will help your organization avoid falling into a budget deficit.

Key assumptions and risks

Your nonprofit exists to serve a particular population or cause. Before you designed your key programs or services, you probably did some research to validate that there’s a need for what you’re offering.

But you probably are also taking some calculated risks. In this section, talk about the unknowns for your organization. If you name them, you can address them.

For example, if you think there’s a need for a children’s literacy program, maybe you surveyed teachers or parents in your area to verify the need. But because you haven’t launched the program yet, one of your unknowns might be whether the kids will actually show up.

Management team and company

Who is going to be involved and what are their duties? What do these individuals bring to the table?

Include both the management team of the day-to-day aspects of your nonprofit as well as board members and mention those who may overlap between the two roles. Highlight their qualifications: titles, degrees, relevant past accomplishments, and designated responsibilities should be included in this section. It adds a personal touch to mention team members who are especially qualified because they’re close to the cause or have special first-hand experience with or knowledge of the population you’re serving.

There are probably some amazing, dedicated people with stellar qualifications on your team—this is the place to feature them (and don’t forget to include yourself!).

Financial plan

The financial plan is essential to any organization that’s seeking funding, but also incredibly useful internally to keep track of what you’ve done so far financially and where you’d like to see the organization go in the future.

The financial section of your business plan should include a long-term budget and cash flow statement with a three to five-year forecast. This will allow you to see that the organization has its basic financial needs covered. Any nonprofit has its standard level of funding required to stay operational, so it’s essential to make sure your organization will consistently maintain at least that much in the coffers.

From that point, it’s all about future planning: If you exceed your fundraising goals, what will be done with the surplus? What will you do if you don’t meet your fundraising goals? Are you accounting for appropriate amounts going to payroll and administrative costs over time? Thinking through a forecast of your financial plan over the next several years will help ensure that your organization is sustainable.

Money management skills are just as important in a nonprofit as they are in a for-profit business. Knowing the financial details of your organization is incredibly important in a world where the public is ranking the credibility of charities based on what percentage of donations makes it to the programs and services. As a nonprofit, people are interested in the details of how money is being dispersed within organizations, with this information often being posted online on sites like Charity Navigator, so the public can make informed decisions about donating.

Potential contributors will do their research—so make sure you do too. No matter who your donors are, they will want to know they can trust your organization with their money. A robust financial plan is a solid foundation for reference that your nonprofit is on the right track.

Business planning is ongoing

It’s important to remember that a business plan doesn’t have to be set in stone. It acts as a roadmap, something that you can come back to as a guide, then revise and edit to suit your purpose at a given time.

I recommend that you review your financial plan once a month to see if your organization is on track, and then revise your plan as necessary.

Additional Help

Our free business plan template can help you work through each section of your plan. Also, be sure to check out a complete nonprofit business plan example for reference. 

If you’re looking for a tool to help you write your business plan, you may want to check out LivePlan. It can easily be configured to create a nonprofit business plan with step-by-step guidance throughout the process. You’ll be able to easily develop forecasts and compare to your actuals through a single dashboard to actively plan, adjust, and present to investors and board members. It’s a great option to keep business planning simple so you can focus on serving those that you’re hoping to help.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2014. It was updated in 2021.

If you’ve been laid off during the current health and financial crisis or you’re just looking for a way to make extra income from home, there are still plenty of business opportunities. While some parts of the economy have ground to a halt, many sectors are still growing. In particular, delivery services, e-commerce, home fitness, collaboration tools, and remote workforces have seen a surge in growth. 

We’ve collected a list of businesses that, even in a crisis, you can still start from home. The majority of these businesses can be started online, require little overhead or equipment and don’t require any kind of physical presence in the world, which is ideal for where we are right now.

Online and home-based businesses you can start today:

Online kids fitness classes

Sports are shut down and kids can’t go to practices or interact with other kids who love to be fit and athletic. If you have an athletic background and have ever been a volunteer coach for a kids’ sports team, there’s a good opportunity to offer indoor training and fitness classes via an online video conferencing system. Parents are more than willing to pay to keep their kids occupied.

Personal Shopper/Errand Runner for Quarantine

There are at-risk people who should not be going to grocery stores. And while there are some services across the country like Instacart, there’s room to create a business that has a more personal touch. Less tech-savvy customers, and even tech-savvy customers, want to talk to a real person, and go through their shopping list and pharmacy pickup list with specifics about items they need. Some of the potential target market could also turn into a long-standing customer, post quarantine. 

Strategic Advisor/Accountant/bookkeeper

Businesses still need to keep their books, even when business is slow. More than ever, businesses need smart accountants that can also be strategic advisors. Start your business with a focus on not just getting the books and taxes done, but helping configure financials and financial reporting so that your clients run better businesses, survive this crisis, and are ready to thrive.

Financial Planner

Many people will suffer financially from this crisis. If you are certified to provide financial planning or have the skills necessary to get the certification, this could be a booming business. This service is easy to offer virtually, and someone with good financial planning skills combined with good people skills could make a big difference in the lives of people struggling to re-think their financial situation. You will need to have a strong online presence and offer relevant services and pricing. 

eCommerce Consulting Company

Laid off from a tech company? Know how to use tech tools for business? More than ever any existing business will need an online presence. We don’t know how COVID-19 will affect the way we operate a business in the future, but there are sure to be some big changes. Help small businesses go online, add eCommerce, and add the right customer service tools to streamline their businesses.

Dog walking & pet care

High-risk folks need help to get their dogs out and folks who are sick are looking for people to care for their animals until they’re back on their feet. This is more of a side-hustle than a full-time business, but there might be some money to be had.

Virtual Assistant

Everyone working for home, while quarantined, is dealing with A LOT. If they have school-aged kids, they are trying to work from home while also keeping kids on track with online schooling, or just flat out trying to homeschool kids. Offering virtual assistant services in a  cost-effective way to organize and help the busy executive who just got busier and could give you a business that grows quickly, and also survives once life has returned to some kind of normalcy. 

Virtual Tutoring Service

All of a sudden pretty much every kid in America, and across many countries, is home. Schools are trying their best to teach kids and adjust, but many kids need more, and some of those kids have parents who will pay for more. You will have to pull together a stable of tutors that have credibility, as well as a full virtual game plan. 

Remote Tech Support

This business can target all those small businesses and individuals that are stuck at home and more dependent on TV, internet, and screens, than ever. Help troubleshoot internet connectivity issues with routers and hardware, help protect machines from malware and viruses, help configure wireless routers in houses for best connectivity to all members of the household. Clearly, to start this business you have to have networking and IT knowledge. If you were laid off from your job, and this is your expertise, you may be able to thrive with this business. 

Digital courses / Online coaching

Do you have a skill you can teach? If you have expertise in a subject matter now is the time to think about turning that expertise into online courses and or online coaching. Maybe you are a photoshop wiz or can teach people how to put together effective PowerPoint presentations, or how to improve their speaking skills. 

Maybe you understand search engine optimization (SEO) and can teach businesses how to maximize their online exposure. The key here is to translate your skills into a packaged or live online course, or online coaching, and then market them online to your network. Use an online learning management system (LMS) and create an online course to offer your skills.

Affiliate marketer/Drop shipper

Every eCommerce seller is looking to maximize their sales right now. If you have skills that allow you to drive traffic (maybe you are a great blogger, or YouTuber, or have a large social media footprint) then you could turn those skills into a business. Become an affiliate for online products, and potentially offer drop shipping services to the vendor, helping them expand their capacity to ship to more customers. 

Etsy Seller

Now is the time to turn your crafts into a business. Do you do amazing woodwork? Are you a skilled knitter? Maybe you turn old boxes into amazing beautiful jewelry boxes?  Don’t be filled though. In order to make a good go at making a business selling on Etsy, you must really have skills that you can turn into beautiful products. If so, then start small and give it a go. 

Virtual birthday party provider

A lot of people are having very different birthdays, graduations, proms, anniversaries, etc. If you can figure out how to use video, virtual platform, music, and perhaps add delivery of presents and goodies for the special person/people, there may be an opportunity to help people celebrate in these very strange times. 

Transcription services

As businesses have to turn to online conferences, meetings and webinars there will be a higher need for transcription services. If you have the patience and a knack for fast accurate typing you can build a business that delivers transcripts from online video and virtual meetings. If you happen to also speak a second language, you can add this skill to your services. You will have to think through managing the work, and potentially hiring some outsourced help. This could be a great business opportunity.

Educational products

Welcome to the new world of educating children. Children around the world are stuck at home and all of a sudden doing all their school work online. Different schools are dealing with this in different ways, some better than others. Education will most likely forever be changed by this immediate move to online learning, and schools, educators and parents will be looking for more and better educational tools and products for this new way of teaching. 

Planning for your new business

If any of these ideas piqued your interest or if you have something else in mind, the best way to get started is to write up a business plan for your idea. Doing so helps you outline the specifics of your new business and cover some of the planning aspects that you may have missed. I recommend that you start with a lean plan, which can be done in as little as an hour and can be turned into a living plan for you to reference and update as your business grows.

You can download our free template and get started right away. Or if you’d rather try an online option that helps you develop your plan through a step-by-step process, you may want to check out LivePlan. 

Additionally, if you’re interested in starting a business but concerned about how it may fare in the current economic crisis, check out our COVID-19 Resource Guide. It includes a number of webinars, articles and updated planning resources to help you guide your current or newly started business through uncertainty.

In 2018, there were more than 7,450 breweries in the U.S.—well over than the historic high of 4,131 breweries in 1873, according to the Brewers Association. In such a crowded market, making good beer and opening the doors isn’t enough anymore.

But, the good news is, if all those people could start a brewery, then you can too—as long as you know what you’re getting into and have a solid business plan for your brewery.

From running coolant pipes to navigating regulations, starting a brewery is a messy, convoluted job full of twists, turns, delays, setbacks, and surprises—but it’s also one heck of a ride.

In this guide to starting a brewery, we’re going to talk with brewers who’ve been-there-done-that, and we’ll get insights from experts in supporting industries such as insurance and finance, as well as discuss regulatory issues.

While it may be your dream to brew great beer, this guide will help introduce you to the business side of craft beer.

This guide will cover the seven essential steps to starting a brewery:

1. Planning a brewery
2. Finding a brewery location
3. Choosing brewery equipment
4. Building relationships with vendors and the local community
5. Funding a brewery
6. Obtaining insurance before opening a brewery
7. Keeping regulations in mind when starting a brewery

Step 1: Planning a brewery

No matter its size or age, every brewery was once a startup.

ColdFire Brewing, a 10-barrel brewery, came online in December 2015, founded by Dan Hughes and his brother Stephen. They’re constantly hard at work on business development and recipe formulation, navigating bureaucracy, and enduring the inevitable delays that come with brewery construction, equipment delivery, and regulatory approval.

“We began to get serious about starting our brewery several years ago, and we were still working out details as we prepared to open our doors,” says Dan.

The Hughes brothers developed a solid business plan and built a core team to bring their vision to reality. Backed by a team of private local investors, ColdFire gained access to additional capital through an SBA loan.

The ColdFire Brewing team meets to plan marketing.

While Dan heads up operations, his brother Stephen is head brewer, and their team also includes directors of finance and brand, respectively.

Watch your finances

Having a key financial person in place has helped them get better at monitoring cash flow and their overall financial status and needs, says Dan. Most small businesses and startups that are looking to grow—hire a new employee, or buy a new piece of equipment, or open a new location—need to think hard about cash flow, or making sure they have enough money in the bank to meet payroll and other financial obligations.

Review your business plan regularly

Committing to regularly reviewing your business plan and financials is a good step toward making more informed, smarter spending decisions, that can have a big impact on a new business’s long term viability. Forcasting, and then comparing your actual results against your projections on a regular basis, will help you spot any issues before it’s too late to do something.

If you don’t have a business plan yet, don’t skip it

If you don’t have a business plan for your brewery just yet, don’t skip it. Planning is proven to help you grow 30 percent faster. Plus, if you’re going to seek a loan or investment, your funders will expect you to have one. If you’re not sure what you should include in your plan, check out brewery sample business plans on Bplans. You can download them for free to help you get started. Here are two of our most popular example plans:

Sedibeng Breweries

About the plan: Sedibeng Breweries is a medium-scale brewery located in the growing industrial center of Selebi Phikwe, Botswana. Initial plans are to produce three main lines of beer. These products will be distributed to remote yet extremely viable areas, where the market is appreciative of readily-available, good-quality brew.

Martin Cove Brewing Company

About the plan: Located in Medford, Oregon, Martin Cove Brewing Company has been a successful microbrewery for the past three years. This year, Martin Cove Brewing Company will gross $520,000 in sales. With this money, they plan to expand its distribution to selected metro areas within the state of Oregon. In addition, they will introduce a new product, a traditional German Marzen-style lager.

Dan Hughes’ advice on starting a brewery

1. The most important detail is defining a clear vision

“We know what kind of brewery we want to create and we have tried to let that vision drive all of our decisions.”

2. There has to be a commitment to the craft

“We find this opportunity to open a brewery a privilege, and we certainly aren’t doing this for the money. In fact, we’re taking a significant pay cut to have the privilege to open a brewery. We do so with a vision toward creating a quality brewery that honors the traditions of those that have gone before us.”

3. Every relationship is important

“When you build a few good relationships, suddenly they open the door for more relationships, and that pattern has only continued to hold true.

“Our bank had heard of us before we ever met them, and our landlord had been approached by other breweries in the past. Fortunately, we have always found it important to treat people well and listen to good people who have good advice. That has ended up serving us well.”

4. Prepare for license and regulation challenges

“They take time—so much time—to file, follow through, and gain approval. Having been planning this for so long, we kind of knew what we were getting into and have thus far been able to get through most of these challenges to-date. But they all take so much time.

“With that said, the federal license, or TTB [Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau] permit, was the longest and most arduous. The more complex the operating structure of a business, the more information and time required.”

Step 2: Finding a brewery location

From land use to public taste, the location where you plan on opening a brewery is a crucial decision. Generally, brewers want to set up shop in their own backyard.

Here are some questions to consider:

• What are the relevant local and state laws affecting breweries? (And there will be plenty—brewing is one of the most regulated industries in the country.)
• Where in your area will you find land or a building with the right zoning, size, facilities, and access for bringing in raw materials, attracting customers, and/or shipping out finished beer for distribution?
• What local favorites will you need on tap to appeal to the market, and where can you innovate to stand out?
• Will you only brew ales, or will you also make space for lagers, a barrel-aging program, and so on?
• What type of brewery will you be: production brewery or brewpub?
• How wide do you want to grow production and distribution, or do you want to focus on selling over your own bar?
• Do you want to scale to multiple locations?
• What construction will be needed to get the doors open on your first location?

All these questions and more will influence the right space for your brewery. However, the main thing is to start with the right space—and one that will be bigger than what you think you will need, says Jason Jordan of Propel Insurance.

“I cannot tell you how many brewers I have talked to in year two to three in business,” he says, “and they all said their biggest regret was not getting a bigger space that they could grow into.”

However, brewers also need to be willing to take a hard look at where they want to locate and do their homework to make sure they can establish a successful brewery there. Word of mouth is no substitute for market research, says Ben Price, co-founder of Hard Knocks Brewing, a small brewpub in its second year of operation.

“The single biggest mistake I have made was locating my business in a town that could not care less about craft beer,” says Ben. He recommends brewers use data firms such as Insightics to see where and how people spend their money in an area.

“You’re looking for a number of 70 percent or more within five miles of the zip code you desire,” says Ben. “I made the mistake of trusting in word of mouth. You want locally oriented people, people who want a good product, made local.”

Tending the Hard Knocks Bar.

Step 3: Choosing brewery equipment

Your initial system will likely be seven to 15 barrels, but run your own numbers. Figure out how much you’ll need to have in production at a time to be profitable.

What you need to know about buying new

A new system might be subject to delays, especially if demand from other breweries is high, but you’ll be able to design to your needs and specifications, and you’ll have support when issues arise (and they will).

“You’ll probably start with a seven-barrel system, spend anywhere between $130,000-$175,000 new,” says Patrick McCarthy, who works in the financial sector and aids breweries with capital and business planning.

Is it a good idea to buy used brewing equipment?

A used system might be through the door quicker and might save you money up front, but make sure you’ve thoroughly reviewed the system and seller—and remember that when you have problems, you’ll likely be on your own to fix them.

“Used systems are almost as expensive, so you’re really not saving anything, but you might get it sooner than ordering new. Some folks cut corners by ordering equipment made offshore. Many brewers avoid that due to perceived qualitative differences,” says Patrick.

How Ninkasi Brewing grew their brewing capacity

Ninkasi Brewing began in 2006 on a 15-barrel system and produced 1,650 barrels. In 2018, Ninkasi sold 90,000 barrels and was the thirty-fifth largest brewery in the U.S., and the fourth largest in its home state of Oregon, after powerhouse brands such as Deschutes, Rogue, and Full Sail. In April, 2019, the brewery sold its majority stake to a larger organization.

Co-founders Jamie Floyd and Nikos Ridge leased their startup system from a family running a German restaurant out of a former brewpub. While brewing and self-distributing their beer, Floyd and Ridge purchased property where they could relocate and expand operations. They moved into their current location with a 20-bbl brew system, three 60-bbl fermenters, and one 20-bbl fermenter. A year later, they replaced the 20-bbl brew system with a 30-bbl system, followed by another expansion a year and a half later to 50 barrels. Today they use an 80-100-bbl brew system, but the 50-bbl is still online for special brewing projects and research-and-development beers.

“We continually planned for growth and capacity, catching up the entire first seven years of being open,” says Jamie. “In a way, it’s easy to build out in this way, as you always need something, so it becomes more about the funding and the logistics.

“We continually made beer while switching out new systems and adding capacity and infrastructure. One of our greatest strengths was our ability to work around the construction we were doing.”

Today, Ninkasi has some serious brewing facilities.

Step 4: Building relationships with vendors and the local community

Starting a microbrewery and brewing great beer is not a solo endeavor. It is a constantly coordinated, ongoing set of relationships with customers, government officials, craftspeople, and your internal people.

Find trusted advisors

“The number one piece of advice I give new brewery clients that are in startup stages is to engage your main business vendors early on in the process and find the right people to serve your needs,” says Jason Jordan.

“You need trusted advisors that are proven in the beverage industry and have a decent portfolio of brewery clients. This would be the architect, business lawyer, intellectual property attorney, banker, insurance broker, real estate agent, label maker, hop grower, malt supplier, tank fabricator, and accountant.”

Hire the right team

Relationships and keeping an ear to the ground are key not only to establishing your brewery, but in how and when you grow. Jason Carriere, the owner of Falling Sky Fermentation Supply Shop and co-founder of Falling Sky Brewing, has gone through many twists and turns since Falling Sky opened its first Eugene, Oregon brewpub location in 2012. Since then they’ve opened a second location, a pourhouse that focuses on food production, and a third location, a pub and pizzeria on the University of Oregon campus.

“I’d been running the homebrew shop for a while,” says Jason. “I’d already seen several of my best employees move on to become brewers around town, so I thought I’d look seriously at making that expansion ourselves, keep the team together, make it so homebrewers who worked at the shop could have a way internally to go pro.”

The new Falling Sky Brewery even opens up onto a garden.

In their first year of production, Falling Sky produced 800 barrels, and they produced 1,300 in 2015—and that’s while getting underway on construction for their third location, moving the homebrew shop, and expanding their current brewhouse.

Know your customers and your financials

Jason believes strongly in “knowing who your customers are and what they want,” balanced with skill and consistent craftsmanship instead of novelty. “I’m not a big believer in recipes, or special combinations of hops no one has thought of,” he explains. “Breweries don’t really win customers with one beer, but they can lose customers with one beer.”

When it comes to growth, Jason advises a thorough understanding of the brewery’s production numbers and financials, balanced with an on-the-ground understanding of daily operations.

That then informs your instincts and intuition. And all this must be tied together with ongoing communications with staff, business partners, vendors, and other key people affecting your business.

“You wouldn’t want to expand if your brewery is at 60 percent capacity and you have empty tanks sitting around,” Jason says. “You also have to have your pulse in the community and the industry to know whether or not you’re saturating certain things, or if you hear about people wanting your beer but not getting it. But it’s all about how we’re going to expand. Just because someone in a market wants your beer, doesn’t mean it’s part of your strategy.”

Be open to opportunities

You also have to be aware of opportunities that arise, though, even if it’s unexpected—and that brings intuition, opportunity, and relationships back in play.

“We had no five-year plan to open a third restaurant, but when we got approached by the University of Oregon, we listened,” says Jason. “It was one of those things where we didn’t really want to expand, but it was far enough in the future that we could plan it through without a rush. Our second location was more rushed.

We were busting at the seams at the brewpub, especially with the kitchen, so the deli expansion was more to let the pub do more of what it needed to do again. The second location had a bigger kitchen, cold storage, etc., to handle making fries and ketchup. It was a combination of good opportunity and vision.”

But that doesn’t mean it was easy. “It was scary, I’m not gonna lie,” says Jason. “When we first did the deli, it looked like a very bad idea for a few months. But it turned around.”

Don’t second guess—trust your team

Jason and his team are not prone to regrets or second-guessing. Not that everything has always been easy or rosy, but he credits solid planning and teamwork with being able to make key moves without looking back and wondering.

For Falling Sky, that includes a strategic decision to focus on location sales instead of wider distribution. “I’m not a big second-guesser. When I make a decision, it’s because I feel confident about that decision, and I’ve thought through the consequences and I’ve come to terms with the consequences of choosing one option over another,” says Jason. “I’m confident in our decision to focus on selling beer over our bar versus the shelf wars and SKU wars.”

Step 5: Funding a brewery

Sure, at its heart beer is made from water, malt, yeast, and hops—but there’s an invisible yet crucial fifth ingredient: money.

Form a relationship with the right bank

Raising capital for any business can be a difficult process, and breweries are no exception. In his various roles in the financial industry, Patrick McCarthy has most recently worked as Vice President Commercial Relationship Manager with Bank of the Cascades, which has 35 companies from the craft beverage industry as customers.

Over the years, institutions he’s worked with have directly banked six breweries, a cidery, and a kombucha producer, and Patrick has also advised dozens of startup breweries, from reviewing business plans to helping prospective brewers network with key people.

Patrick sees his role not just as analyzing a business plan or crunching numbers. “You want to be helpful and move the whole business along,” he says. “If a business comes into the bank that’s wonderful, but at the least you’ve made some friends.”

Here is Patrick’s overall advice for startups to make sure they’re not only brewing quality beer, but keeping solid books:

1. Banks are not consistent sources of startup capital

A new brewery is probably not going to a bank for a startup loan (banks usually come into play for capital to fund growth once a brewery is more established). Friends and family are the most common backers, and many startups bootstrap. Some cities, such as Portland, Oregon also have what Patrick calls “beer angels”—private angel investors who understand the beer business and invest in select breweries and cideries.

Loans from the Small Business Administration (SBA) can also be a good avenue, but from “bank to bank the SBA program is used differently,” says Patrick. “Some bankers have a great deal of interest, knowledge, and depth, and can be a champion for a startup brewery. But a lot of banks look at breweries as restaurants and avoid them, or want to see them in business three to four years before they invest.”

2. Be realistic about your business potential

When Patrick looks at a new business, here are some of the things he looks for to inform his sense of the brewery’s chance of success:

• Do they know how to make good beer? Have they made good beer elsewhere? Won awards?
• What is their brewing experience? If someone’s been a garage brewer for five years, that’s different from someone who’s been brewing at an established brewery for the past 15 years.
• Do they have good credit? If not, why not?
• How much skin do they have in the game financially? Will they be able to handle delays? Do they have access to contingency capital?

3. There’s no one model—or one business plan—for breweries

Each brewery will have its own unique business model and business plan. Before opening a brewery, prospective brewers have to figure out the right business model for their plans, location, interests, startup resources, and long-term vision.

Typical models include taphouses, production breweries, and full brewpubs. There’s also a new phenomenon called an “alternating proprietorship,” says Patrick, where brewers brew part-time on someone else’s system.

Within any model, there are things breweries can focus on to stand out and increase revenue. “Some brewers emphasize food in part because the food dollar can translate into more dollars profit for beer,” says Patrick. “Managing your own distribution is ideal. There are overhead tradeoffs, but I’m seeing it more and more.” Exports are becoming another component, he observes, with international markets such as Japan becoming thirstier and thirstier for American craft beer.

“Everyone’s trying to find what they can afford, what works,” he explains. “Merely making good beer isn’t enough anymore. There’s way too much good beer out there to stand out immediately.”

Even if you’re not seeking funding, it’s still a really good idea to create a Lean Business Plan that you can use to help navigate your business as challenges and opportunities arise. The benefit of a Lean Plan is that it’s meant to be reviewed and changed regularly, so you’re not just taking a snapshot of your business and goals once, and then shelving it for five years.

4. Cash must be available to cover costs and offset delays

On an industry-wide basis, for small to medium-sized breweries, the ratio between sales and fixed assets is typically for every $6 of sales, a brewery has $1 of fixed assets.

Estimate brewery startup costs

Start with estimating your startup costs. A new and growing brewery’s biggest costs tend to be the brewing system (e.g., $130,000–$175,000 for a new seven-barrel system) and tenant improvements to the property (which in Patrick’s experience in Oregon, including Portland markets, has typically ranged $200,000–$350,000).

“It’s expensive to alter a commercial space that doesn’t have drains, certain water lines, the required electrical, ventilation, etc.,” he explains. “Many also put in a back bar, seating, etc.” Costs vary by scope, location, and market.

Anticipate delays and setbacks

“Problems with licensing or permitting with the city that cause delay of opening can be extremely expensive,” says Patrick. “Every day they can’t pour their own beer is catastrophic financially. That’s the biggest risk I’ve seen in startup stages: timing.”

Delays are a reality in startup breweries. Brew system fabrication and delivery can take longer than the agreed timetable. Regulatory or permit approvals can drag on for months. Construction can hit unexpected snags. Make sure your financial reserves can handle delays and extra costs.

“Seasonality matters too,” explains Patrick. “You want to have the doors open when the beer-drinking season gets started. Winter months are usually the slowest for a brewery. You want to be open by April or May. Ideally, that’s not always in your control due to startup delays, but starting with April to May you want to operate during those busier months.”

5. Treat your accounting with as much respect as your brewing

“I’ve passed on a brewer that didn’t respect the accounting process,” says Patrick. “The brewers are focused on their first love, which is making delicious beer. Accounting isn’t necessarily the top and foremost in everyone’s mind, but in this situation, it was irresponsibly ignored. You can’t let the accounting take a distant back seat.”

Just as quality control is essential for good beer, you have to make sure the books are balanced and the financials are being tracked well. “Accounting keeps you out of trouble,” says Patrick. “It helps you plan, helps you get a return, and ultimately helps you generate revenue.”

Metrics: Know your numbers

Okay, so understanding your financials is important, but what do you need to track in order to understand the financial health of your brewery?

Here are the numbers, metrics, and other indicators Patrick says brewers should monitor:

• Breweries should typically break even or generate a small profit by the first six to 12 months of operation. “They’re at least breaking even, but they’re not paying themselves much yet.”
• Between 12 to 18 months, there should be a 10 to 15 percent bottom-line profitability. “If I’m used to seeing all models being profitable two years out by at least 10 to 15 percent,” says Patrick, “then if you’re not, I need to understand why or how you’re going to get there.”
• Beyond that, examine year-round profitability on a quarterly basis, with a focus on being profitable annually, and at least breaking even quarterly.
• If food is part of the business, are food costs (food-cost-percent and food labor) being contained at 20 to 25 percent of food revenues?
• Are you at capacity or will you be at capacity soon? What do you need for equipment for the next six months to keep up with demand?
• Cash flow. What is your financial liquidity, especially at the end of each quarter and at the beginning of the fourth quarter, given that winter is often a slower season?
• What is your leverage, the ratio between total liabilities and net worth? “There’s no magic number,” says Patrick, “but the greater the leverage the greater the risk in the business model. If someone is exceeding three-to-one, two-to-one, I have to take a harder look at it. Sometimes that can be a fleeting ratio and adjusts. If the leverage is pushed out, I need to understand why. Is it losses? Is it mismanagement?”
• Is it time to scale? If the balance sheet is showing that you have $7 to 8 sales for every $1 assets (and $6 sales for every $1 assets is typical), Patrick says it’s time to examine scaling.

As you find your stride in a profitable bottom line, you’ll also examine increasing efficiency. For example, as production volume increases, breweries typically purchase a grain silo. “They can buy in bulk, easily cut grain expense by two-thirds,” says Patrick. “Grain silos tend to pencil out quickly. It’s an exciting step up.”

The same thinking applies across the brewery. “At some point when you get larger, you’ve got more money to squeeze that remaining five percent profit out of your beer.”

Putting together a sales forecast and a cash flow forecast that you monitor at least monthly can be really helpful. Running a business or Lean Plan review meeting that also covers your financials is a great way to hold yourself accountable.

Step 6: Obtaining insurance before opening a brewery

Breweries need various insurance, just like any other business. A brewery with a large employee roster and a fleet of self-distribution vehicles will have different needs from a three-person production-only startup. Find an insurance agent you can trust who preferably has experience working with breweries or wineries.

No, insurance is not as sexy as deciding which new “it” hop is going to be the feature of your new IPA, but if a brewery doesn’t keep current on their insurance needs, says Jason Jordan at Propel Insurance, then they are asking for trouble.

Note: Insurance and bond requirements vary by state, locality, and type of brewery, so make sure you’re talking with your insurance agent and even your lawyer for what’s right for your operation and where you’re planning on starting a brewery.

The biggest concern is the lease contract with the landlord, says Jordan. “That can be boilerplate or have a myriad of different insurance coverage and limit requirements to comply with.”

Here are other areas of coverage Jordan says a brewery might need, which will vary depending on the operation:

• Business income and extra expense coverage
• Backup of sewer and drains
• Equipment breakdown coverage (depending on the age of their brew system)
• Property insurance on all equipment and business property
• Key man insurance via a buy-sell agreement (if the brewery has multiple partners)
• Market valuation coverage (for offerings such as a barrel aging program)
• Product recall coverage “is sometimes a concern”
• Crime coverage for theft of money and securities
• Commercial auto insurance is key if expanding into or starting to self-distribute product
• Workers comp is mandatory if employees are on the payroll, which also necessitates employment practices liability insurance (known as EPL insurance or EPLI) to cover hiring and firing practices

A brewery’s most common claims tend to relate to workers comp injuries, such as employees straining a muscle or hurting their back lifting heavy items, says Jordan. Lost product from a power outage or mechanical breakdown of a glycol chiller is another common problem, as are backups of sewers and drains (causing damage to the space and interruption of business, equating to lost revenue.

Luckily, once you are up and running with your insurance, “the needs don’t change a lot from a brewery or brewpub that produces 500 barrels a year to 25,000 barrels a year,” says Jordan. “The biggest concern is keeping up with values on equipment for new purchases and expansions to make sure the brewery is adequately insured at the time of a loss. Brewery owners are notorious for brewing good beer and not for keeping up to speed on calling their agent to make changes.” Stay on top of it to help keep your costs lower in the long run.

Step 7: Keeping regulations in mind when starting a brewery

Of course, there are laws and regulations—and brewing is a highly regulated industry. Your brewery will need approvals and compliance with relevant local, state, and federal authorities, such as your state’s alcohol oversight organization and the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, or TTB.

In Oregon, for example, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC) mandates a producer carry a $300,000 limit for liquor liability. At the federal level, the TTB requires all new breweries that want to offer beer for sale to submit a Brewer’s Notice. The TTB has a Brewers Qualification webpage outlining what you’ll need to do when starting a brewery to have the proper federal approvals.

“No matter how much you think you know, you will have more to learn.”- Jamie Floyd, @Ninkasi
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“No matter how much you think you know […] you will have more to learn,” says Jamie Floyd, co-founder of Ninkasi Brewing. “It changes and evolves and you have to know the people who are making the changes and you have to be ready to change as a company. If the FDA decides we need to put nutritional info on our bottles you have to do it. It’s the law. You will have to figure it out and pay for it.”

Get to know your legislators

Jamie also recommends getting to know your legislators at all levels of government and working with trade groups that try to update and influence state and federal policies related to the regulation and taxation of beer.

The growth of the industry is also leading to regulations being modified state to state, says Patrick, “if not to encourage craft beverages then to make it a more viable business model.”

Be ready for compliance and paperwork-based delays

In the meantime, compliance is not necessarily easy or fast. “Some of it is more the tediousness of the paperwork. Make one small change, file everything over again,” says Jason Carriere, co-founder of Falling Sky Brewing.

“TTB is known for a lack of timely responses. We submitted our application for the third expansion nearly two months ago, and we’re not even supposed to call and check the status for ninety days. Then when you do call, you sit on hold for two hours to find out where your application is in someone’s stack.”

Don’t forget federal obligations

Breweries also need the Brewer’s Notice. “That’s a brewery’s permission from the federal government to brew commercially,” says Jason. “It involves taxes, a bond you have to pay that serves as insurance for paying beer taxes. You complete an environmental impact statement for water and environment. It’s permission to make an alcoholic beverage and pay the taxes on it in the U.S.”

While starting a brewery requires lots of dedication, capital, vision, and red-tape navigation, it is also a booming industry and brewers who have a solid plan and stay their course have a solid chance of success. “The numbers are proving themselves: Craft beverages are here to say,” says Patrick. “There’s bound to be a slowdown eventually, but there’s one to two breweries a day opening across the country. People want it, and if people want it, people will supply it.”

And that someone could be you.

Editor’s note: This article originally published in 2016. It was updated in 2019.

This article is part of our Business Startup Guide—a curated list of our articles that will get you up and running in no time! It’s also part of our Bplans guide to coming up with a great idea.

For some people, coming up with ideas is as easy as spotting chewing gum on the sidewalk. For others, it’s nearly impossible.

For me, new idea generation isn’t just easy, it’s something I’m doing all the time and often without trying. I do not believe this is an innate ability, but rather a “skill” that I’ve learned and practiced over the entire course of my life.

While this “learning” has primarily been subconscious, as I’ve run into more and more people who struggle to come up with new ideas, I’ve made an effort to become conscious of how I do it and where I do it best. The fact that research on the subjects of creativity and innovation has become so popular certainly helps too.

I fully believe that anyone who puts in enough practice and who makes a conscious effort to notice problems and identify needs can improve their ability to come up with new ideas.

A brief bit of science before we dive into how to come up with ideas:

Good ideas are networks

The brain is largely composed of neurons—about 100 billion of them. Connected together, they form a nervous system that is capable of making decisions, sensing surroundings, and issuing commands to our body.

How we think, what we think, and what we’re capable of, are largely a consequence of the connections these neurons have made with one another.

Every feeling, every thought, every memory, and every sensation you have is a direct result of the signals that pass between the neurons in your brain.

In fact, something particularly interesting about the human brain is its ability to rewire these connections and to make new connections, regardless of age. Neuroscientists refer to this property as “plasticity.” And, the more experiences we have and the more changes in behavior or environment that we experience, the more plastic the brain becomes, or, the more capable of making new connections and rewiring old connections.

This is why, in our older years when most of us do less and use our brains less, we have a harder time remembering information and controlling bodily actions. Our brain has not stopped being plastic, but has simply fallen out of the habit of making new connections.

A similar difference exists for those in the habit of generating new ideas and those who aren’t. The more practice you get doing it, the better your brain will become at creating new connections. Simply put, the more active you keep your brain, the easier you will find it to come up with new, good ideas!

The perfect state of mind for idea creation

Steve Johnson, the author of “Where Good Ideas Come From,” has spent years researching and writing about this subject.

He believes that you are more likely to develop great ideas when:

• You explore and experiment in different areas
• You allow your idea to develop slowly, over time
• You are exploring and open to the idea of serendipitous connections
• You make mistakes
• You look for new uses for old inventions
• You build on platforms that have come before

If you read his book, it will become obvious fairly quickly that the environments you spend time in contribute to or detract from your ability to ideate.

“In order to create new connections, you need to place yourself in environments that actually mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible.”

– Steve Johnson

When humans first organized themselves into dense settlements, innovation soared.

With the invention of agriculture, for the first time, humans began forming settled groups that numbered in the thousands. This meant that more connections with more people were possible and that a good idea could quickly spill over and take root in others’ minds.

If you keep this in mind as you work, live, and experiment, you’ll quickly realize that it’s a lot easier to come up with new ideas when you’ve got an influx of ideas coming your way in the first place. This doesn’t have to happen in a city, a university, or an environment full of people; it can just as easily happen if you’re interacting with ideas from many people online, in books, and across other modes of communication. The key is “connectedness.”

With this in mind, let’s move on to how you can actually go about coming up with business ideas.

1. Business ideas that solve problems

The easiest way to come up with business ideas is to solve the problems you have. The second easiest is to solve problems others have. These don’t have to be big solutions like Google search or Amazon—they could be much smaller.

One company that solves a big problem I have, thanks to owning cats that use the litter box a lot, is Fresh Step. Fresh Step has created a line of “scoopable” cat litter, which means that when the cat does its business, the litter clumps together and I can scoop it out no problem. Ultimately, it means I have to change the sand less often and that cleaning up is a lot easier.

Another of my favorite products that solves a problem for me are my Bose headphones (mind you, I don’t have this fancy version). That’s because they’re fitted with noise-canceling technology. This means a lot when you’re working in a busy office, or when you’re taking public transport. Hello world, goodbye world. You literally have to be tapped on the shoulder to hear people coming. When I first tried these headphones on, I felt like I was underwater. Today, they’re a necessity.

Many of the products you have become used to using were actually invented to solve a problem, including Thermoflasks to keep drinks and food warm, sunglasses to protect from the glare, security alarms to alert you that someone has broken in, fire hydrants to put out a fire before the whole place goes up, toothbrushes to keep your teeth clean, and dental floss to fish out unwanted food. The list is literally endless.

All you have to do is get good at identifying problems

Once you’ve realized that each of your own frustrations is actually an idea in the making, you’re actually going to start having fun!

One of the frustrations that I wish there was a product for is something you probably think is too obvious—a jewelry stand. Because I have so much jewelry, I have to stick thumbtacks in the wall to hold it all up. There is no stand that I have seen on the market to solve my problem—only small stands for a time long past when people bought fewer but more expensive items.

Today, I’d almost describe fashion as “disposable.” You buy something, you wear it a few times and set it aside, partly because things like costume jewelry have become so cheap. Because this is true, people that enjoy jewelry accrue a lot of it and, as you can see in the picture below, don’t have a place to put it.

My problem? Too much jewelry and no stand to fit it all.

Another good example of a company that has come with a business idea by solving a problem is U.K. car insurance company ingenie.

For many young drivers, the cost of insurance just isn’t affordable. Ingenie has taken a rather clever approach to solve this problem. They’ve created a small black box that you fit into your car. As you drive, the box monitors your driving style, including things like braking, speed, acceleration, turns, and so on. Every 10 days, the box assigns you a score out of 100. The higher your score, the bigger the discount you’ll receive on your insurance policy come the three month review period.

Ingenie claims to help customers (often students) save up to 50 percent of what they would otherwise be paying. And, there’s the added bonus of encouraging people to drive better. Very clever.

I’ll leave you with one last example: consider GoPro, the camera company that got started in 2002. Founder Nick Woodman had recently been on a surfing trip to Indonesia, and was unable to find amateur photographers who could get close enough to get good action-shot pictures of him surfing, or who could obtain quality equipment at an affordable price.

The solution to the problem? The GoPro camera—a wide-angle lens HD camera capable of taking excellent video and good action shots, and which could go where other affordable cameras couldn’t. Snap one into a case and you can literally do anything with it, from scuba diving and extreme mountain biking to flying (and crashing) a model airplane.

Footage shot by a GoPro camera attached to a model airplane in Derbyshire, England.

As you go about your daily tasks, be they at home or work, try to get in the mindset of noticing the things that frustrate you.

If you’ve been in a particular industry for a while, you may have good insight into this, as there may be things that have been a problem for a long time. This is why venture capitalists like Boris Wertz see value in investing in those that have a lot of experience in the market they’re pitching their idea for. He calls it “the secret of the market.” It’s this secret, or those problems, that you have to identify.

For me, sitting at work, it’s having to stay at my desk—because that’s the only place I have two monitors—that irks me. A lot of the time, I need to leave my desk to do writing in a quieter area. But, without a second screen, writing and research don’t go hand in hand. I like to have my research up on the one screen and do my writing on the other. Moving away from my desk is always a sacrifice. The solution to this problem would, of course, be a laptop with two screens—now, who is willing to help me start the company?

Even if you work for someone else, try to get into the habit of finding the pain points. It baffles me when companies have products that their own employees don’t use. Palo Alto Software, for example, uses their own product, LivePlan, to manage and keep track of key business metrics. If they didn’t do this, they wouldn’t fully understand a user’s pain points, or know if problems needed fixing. 

Once you get into the habit of finding problems, you’ll probably start to enjoy it. Remember, every problem is an opportunity for a new product, service, or company, especially if it’s a problem many others have too.

2. Solve things that may become problems

Solving problems that you currently have is not the only way to come up with new ideas. Why not think of solving problems that will exist, but don’t yet?

In this very futuristic sense, no one stands out quite so well here as Elon Musk. The ventures he undertakes, including Solar City and Tesla Motors, may make some scoff, but lack of fossil fuels will become a problem in the near future, and Elon is taking steps to fix that before it happens. This gives him the time to innovate, as he’s first in and it gives him market share. Good luck to others catching up!

If you think there’s not yet a market for your idea, you may just be able to create one by appealing to those that, like you, believe it will be a problem in the future.

At present, there are numerous potential problems with obvious solutions, including desalination plants for California, a state that is quickly drying up and running out of water, preventative medication for diseases that could become problems (like ebola), makeup and accessories to protect privacy when face recognition software really takes off, and breeding programs or nature reserves for animals that will become extinct without help.

3. Adapt to evolving needs

Physiological needs stay the same—the need for food, shelter, and water. Emotional needs tend to stand the same—often based on envy, greed, pride, and so on. What doesn’t stay the same are the products and services it takes to fulfill these needs.

The easiest products to market are also products that fulfill a real or contemporary need.

An example of a service that is everywhere now is cloud storage. You don’t hear as much these days about the growing CD or SD card market. You can still get them, but it’s increasingly easy to store everything online.

It’s a result of our very contemporary need to have access to our data, information, photos, music, and so on, no matter what device we’re on. Google sells cloud storage, as does Dropbox, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and a host of private companies that do as well.

4. Save people money

Yet another great way to come up with ideas is to think about saving people money. I buy 23-watt, energy-saving light bulbs because they’re affordable, not because they last for years and are actually the equivalent of a 100-watt lightbulb, though that’s an obvious bonus too.

I also continue filling my car with ARCO gas because it’s cheaper than Chevron and Shell, even though they’re owned by BP who was responsible for the horrible Gulf spill.

And, even though I am desperate for real-life bookstores not to vanish as a consequence of sites like Amazon, I still prefer to buy my books on Amazon because it saves me a lot of money. Were it up to me, I’d own a Tesla, I’d only buy books from independent bookstores, and I’d buy all my food at local farmers markets.

The truth is, unless you’re earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, pounds, or euros, it’s still a luxury to be able to make more “moral decisions” to buy from and support better companies and people. 

This is why, if you can figure out how to save people money, you’ll have a good business idea, new or not. Have a look at some of our money saving tips for further information on this topic.

5. Make people’s lives easier

A coffee machine with a timer that ensures there’s hot coffee when you wake; a central vacuum cleaning system that means only carrying a hose and brush around the house rather than the full unit; a smart thermostat like Nest that can figure out how to save you energy; shopping baskets placed at convenient intervals in the store in case you decide you want to purchase more than what your arms can hold—the list goes on and on.

Remember, coming up with business ideas doesn’t mean you have to focus on inventing new products or services. In fact, you could just as easily adapt an existing service or introduce a new benefit that makes peoples’ lives easier.

Kohls is one company that I return to time and time again because they’ve got a lifetime return policy. Even if you’ve lost your box and your receipt, they will take back a product and replace or refund it—your choice. Not only does this make me feel good about the company, but it keeps me coming back, despite the fact that their prices have obviously been marked up to account for this benefit. In short, it makes my life easy.

When I moved to Eugene, Oregon, I bought my microwave, kettle, toaster, and vacuum cleaner from Kohls, knowing that when they packed in, as electronics always do, I can take them back even if that’s in four years time when I’m guaranteed to have lost or thrown out my receipt.

There are always small ways you could be making things easier for yourself or for others. In fact, if you think about doing this on an ongoing basis, you may find you’re also able to release new products that are simply a version of the old product that makes someone’s life easier in some small way. The Garmin Nuvi is a step up on GPS predecessors that did not include live traffic updates. This small addition makes the product so much more useful and helpful. The Waze app takes it a step further—you only need your phone to get those real, drive-time traffic updates and reroutes. No separate GPS required.

Can you think of something—an action, product, service, or chore that could be adapted to make your life easier?

My Salomon trail running shoes do exactly this. Instead of normal laces, they have pull laces, which means they don’t come undone when I’m running. They don’t fit as well as my Asics, do but they mean I stop a lot less because for some reason tying laces has never been my strong point.

Start looking at the things around you and asking, how could this be easier? How could it be more intuitive, less stressful, and in general more pleasant to use? You may find that even the tiniest change will create something incredibly popular. The book, “The Design of Everyday Things,” can be a great starting point—check it out.

6. Make chores or things that feel like tasks less unpleasant

In the online world, marketers and developers often look to “gamifying” software in order to make using it feel less onerous. That is, they come up with small ways to reward you for taking an action.

When I go running, I use the Strava app on my phone to track my distance and my average speed. Each time I beat a previous record, Strava gives me a trophy or some other small acknowledgment that makes me feel I’ve achieved something. Occasionally, this will push me to go a little bit farther, as once I’ve got into the habit of receiving trophy icons, it’s very difficult to do a run and not get one! The point is, it makes my run a little more fun.

What do you hate doing? How could you make it more enjoyable? Personally, I need someone to make hanging my clothes less of a pain, to make drinking water feel less like a “to do,” and to take all my bills and pay them for me. Know of any solutions?

7. Turn a hobby or something you’re passionate about into a business

For those of you already actively making or doing something, this may be an obvious next step. Or, if you’ve been doing something on a regular basis and find yourself good at it but don’t think of it as a hobby, perhaps you should think about how it could be a business.

Things that I do on a regular basis that could potentially be turned into business ideas include glass painting, writing, researching, jewelry making, fixing jewelry, illuminated lettering, social media training, and so on. Everyone has things they do on a regular or semi-regular basis. If you’re good at any of these things and are looking for business ideas, you just might want to think about turning your hobby into a business.

My sister’s boyfriend, Alex Alotte, is doing just this. When he worked as a bartender in the San Francisco bay area, he wanted to be able to use the best tools possible, not just because a craftsman’s tools are his pride, but also because they’re an important part of your image.

Alex catered for a number of reputable clients and companies, so this last part was especially important. Unfortunately, there weren’t a whole lot of quality muddlers on the market that he could choose from. Most were plastic, or they were made using boring wood, or they were poorly shaped, poorly finished—you name it. So, when a relative who was enrolled in a high school wood­ shop course heard about Alex’s hunt for the “perfect muddler,” he suggested Alex make one himself.

Given that he enjoyed using his hands and already felt he needed a hobby, Alex decided to make his own muddlers or to make, in his words, “high quality, beautiful, wooden muddlers that verge on art!”

He purchased a lathe and all manner of other tools and set to work. The result is a product that resembles a small bat or large pestle, which, when used by a bartender, serves a similar purpose to a pestle, grinding, mashing, or crushing herbs, sugars, fruits, and ice. Mojitos are made using muddlers, but hardly ever using ones like Alex has created, out of beautifully-figured wood.

While Alex is still refining his product, he’s already sold one of his “art” muddlers for 50 dollars. The next step will be setting up an online store and figuring out how to make this a full-time business.

Alex Alotte’s handmade muddlers.

If you find the idea of starting a business intimidating, start with something you know. This way, it might not feel like a business and you’ll enjoy the process as you go.

Be sure to think carefully about how you’ll feel if things do work out, however. You may find things suddenly become less enjoyable as you’ve got to start doing your hobby to meet customer demands or to pay the bills. Or, you might just need a new hobby!

8. Fulfill a need

Take any of the human needs on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and think of the products and services created to meet these needs. Then, build on those.

Consider: As humans, we have a constant need to hydrate ourselves. If we did not drink water, we’d die. As such, we’ve had plumbing built into our houses and into all of the buildings we work in and visit.

But, despite being able to pop in almost anywhere to drink water for free, companies have come up with additional ways to meet this need. They’ve provided solutions for water on the go. They’ve provided solutions for flavored water on the go, for “vitamin” water, even CBD-infused water in some areas.

Move up to the love/belonging level on Maslow’s pyramid, and you get companies like Facebook that allow a user to feel a sense of connection with friends and family.

Move up another level to esteem and you get the likes of Tony Robbins with books and tapes on how to achieve your dreams, improve your self-confidence, and become the best.

It might feel a little manipulative looking at things this way, but many of the products you use already bear reference to these needs, including the toilet paper you buy (physiological), the locks you have on your door and the pepper spray you carry (safety), the birthday card you buy for your friend (love/belonging), the feedback you seek via recommendations on LinkedIn (esteem) and the tools and situations (like the Peace Corps) that allow you to practice your creativity, morality, or problem-solving skills (self-actualization).

9. Appeal to a base emotion

What makes you angry? What makes you happy? What makes you jealous?

Author and renowned copywriter Andy Maslen phrases appealing to base emotions a little differently; he says, exploit a base emotion. 

Think of it as you will (positive or negative), but fundamentally, Andy is right. According to him, humans often make decisions based on one of seven emotions.

These emotions are more popularly known as the seven deadly sins:

• Pride
• Envy
• Lust
• Greed
• Gluttony
• Sloth
• Anger (wrath)

When you consider some of the services and products available to us today, you’ll quickly realize how many of them were invented to appeal to or take advantage of these emotions. Take beauty salons as an obvious example; how many people really need their nails buffed or their legs waxed to survive?

The fact is, that as a society, we have taken evolutionary reactions a step further. Where cleaning hair may previously have been an action we took in order to attract a mate and look better than the competition, today we’ve taken it to the extreme.

Now, rather than simply having products that get the job done, we have products that build on and create new needs, like salt spray to add volume to hair, hairspray to hold a style, dry shampoo for when you don’t have time to shower. Companies are able to sell these products because they’re still able to exploit our base needs.

I have very fine hair, so salt spray and volumizing shampoo is an easy sell. Oil, not so much—however, for my friends with really thick, bushy hair, oils are the easy sell. All of this is exploiting our pride. After all, none of these products are really necessary.

Take a look at those seven deadly sins and see if you can think of how products and services you use on a regular basis are exploiting those needs. Perhaps you’ll even start picking up on how advertisers do the same!

10. Experience more

It’s true that the more you do and the more you experience, the more material you will have at your disposal to be able to create new ideas or stitch together seemingly disparate ideas.

In fact, Bill Gates believes so strongly in the power of serendipity in order to come up with new ideas, that he frequently allots time to read books on a number of different subjects in a short amount of time.

Nirmalya Kumar, professor of marketing at the London Business School, knows how important it is to be curious and to look outside of your own business or industry in order to come up with new ideas.

In this video interview below, he says that if he did not read broadly and try to find connections, he would always feel he was going to write or say the same thing as everyone else. Primarily reading outside of business helps him come up with new ideas and draw new correlations between topics.

According to Nirmalya, “Intelligence and raw knowledge are overrated. It’s more important to have diverse interests.”

His discussion with interviewer Matt Symonds is so interesting; I encourage you to watch it if you have the time.

The other simple things you can do to make coming up with ideas easier is to simply do more. This is how I come up with new topics to write about, new case studies or people to mention, and new things to say. If I didn’t do this, I’d be limited to those things I know. Doing things and reading things that differ from my “usual” activities hopefully gives me more interesting stories to share!

11. Steal others’ ideas

There is no shame in this. In fact, most good ideas are built upon someone else’s idea.

The dissertation that I ended up submitting for my MA program actually grew out of the seed of a story that my sister had written while in high school. I liked her idea so much that during my undergraduate degree I built on the idea.

Take J. K. Rowling and Harry Potter. Don’t tell me the Death Eaters weren’t modeled off the Ku Klux Klan, and that the spiders in the Forbidden Forest didn’t bear reference to Lord of the Rings, or that J. K. Rowling didn’t use myths as a basis from which to create the strange and fascinating creatures in her books. In fact, even the entirely fictional game of Quidditch has origins in the idea that witches ride broomsticks. She simply built on this idea.

I’ll leave you with this final thought from Albert Einstein: “Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”

How do you come up with ideas?

There are so many different ways to do this; I’ve only mentioned a few. However, I hope that through these examples, you’ll be able to come up with your own ideas or to improve on others’ ideas.

Still looking for more business ideas? Check out the Bplans guide to coming up a great idea. Once you think you’ve found a solid idea to start with, check out this article on how to know if you have a good idea. And, this free downloadable idea checklist will help you think through every aspect of your potential business idea, including how to test it out.

This article is part of our Business Startup Guide—a curated list of our articles that will get you up and running in no time!

Starting up a business requires a lot of different steps.

First-time entrepreneurs and small business founders often feel anxious when they think about all the factors that play into getting their idea off the ground.

Plus, it can seem like success or failure hinges on finding deep-pockets funders, expert mentors, ample press coverage, and other “champions.”

But the truth is, you already possess some of the most important assets you’ll need to achieve success. These are nothing less than your personal faculties—the awesome power of your own head, your own heart, and your own hands.

In other words, much of your potential for success will be determined by:

1. The quality of your idea
2. The strength and sincerity of your belief in it
3. Your effort to make it a reality

Succeed with your head: The impact of innovative ideas

Big or small, every successful business starts with an innovative idea.

Nike was born when Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman recognized the hidden potential of a waffle iron to improve soles for running shoes. Howard Schultz brought the espresso bar concept from Italy to the United States and grew Starbucks into a global phenomenon. And when Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1994, many people had never even heard of something called the internet.

True, your business aspirations may be on a more modest scale than these world-famous brands. Nevertheless, your first step is to come up with an innovative idea.

But where to begin? Tim Berry, the founder of Palo Alto Software and Bplans, says there is no better starting point than looking in the mirror. Each of us is a unique individual. Within ourselves, we each carry the seeds of entrepreneurial success—concepts that interest us, questions that intrigue us, skills that set us apart, and an internal sense that some things could be done differently and better.

It’s good to have role models in business, but you should not try to mimic someone else’s success. Successful businesses are always built from the special aptitudes and unique insights of the people who founded them. Your truly innovative idea will be as one-of-a-kind as you are.

Succeed with your heart: The power of positive belief

To bring your idea to fruition, you must genuinely believe in it.

Good luck persuading others to invest if you can’t convey your own enthusiasm and confidence in your idea. An idea for a business might seem “great,” but if it fails to ignite your sense of passion, it probably isn’t the right one for you. Go back to the drawing board and come up with an idea you can truly commit to.

A secure and persevering spirit will be an essential factor in your success. Trust that you will adapt to changes; learn to conquer fear and approach uncertainty with confidence. Become fiercely committed to seeing your goals through.

For example, if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur who feels “mathematically challenged” (and many of us do), then you may feel intimidated by financial forecasting and fall into a pattern of prioritizing other tasks. You may tell yourself you’re “too busy” tending to outside obligations or allow yourself to get bogged down in other details of ongoing business planning.

Sometimes we engage in such behaviors just to procrastinate. At other times we are actually creating preemptive excuses for the failure we fear is inevitable. If left unchecked, negative belief can grow into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Freeing yourself of negativity will require a conscious effort. Take note of the goals you tend to put off and the productive tasks you habitually avoid. Ask yourself why. As you learn to identify the negative beliefs that are impeding your progress, you will feel empowered to begin changing them.

Use tools that can help you manage the challenging aspects of your business. For example, if finances are challenging and you notice that you avoid reviewing them, use a business planning and ongoing financial management tool with a dashboard so you can see where you are without getting bogged down in spreadsheets.

If you need to learn more about digital marketing, take an online class—just take small steps toward the things that seem overwhelming. You don’t have to solve everything all in one day. Small accomplishments can mean a lot when you’re trying to get out of a procrastination rut.

Succeed with your hands: The effectiveness of effort

The best ideas and most heartfelt belief are of little value without the resolve to take action and work hard.

You will sometimes hear people explain a business leader’s success by giving credit to “good luck.” People who talk like this have little knowledge or practical experience starting a  business.

If you believe in succeeding through perseverance, you have the right frame of mind to do what it takes to make your business grow. Those who believe in success through luck might be better served to buy lottery tickets. In business, there is no such thing as luck; you achieve success because you are willing to work hard for it.

People who are accustomed to working hard are less inclined to feel overwhelmed by challenges. They are eager to acquire new skills because they can quickly put them to good use. And contrary to the image of the “head in the clouds” visionary, you will probably find that your most inspired thinking actually occurs when you are engaged in productive work. Research even indicates that hard-working people tend to live longer than take-it-easy types.

Thomas Edison famously said, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” Much has changed since Edison’s day, but sweat equity is still the most effective kind of startup capital.

Practical ways to get started

If you’ve been thinking about starting a business but you haven’t yet taken the leap, there are a few ways you can position yourself for success.

1. If you have a business idea, write a quick business plan—a Lean Plan

If you’ve heard of the business model canvas idea, Lean Planning is similar but ultimately more useful. You can download the Bplans Lean Plan Template to help you get started.

2. Validate your idea and make sure that it’s one worth pursuing

Passion is important, but so are the details.

Use your Lean Plan to help you think through your ideal target market, the specifics on your product or service, and whether you’ll need to seek a loan or private investment. This idea validation checklist can help you think through every aspect.

3. Make sure you take care of the details

When you’re ready to start a business, you’ll need to think about registering your business’s legal structure, doing market research, finding office space if you need it, developing a website for an online business—and more!

Use this startup checklist—it will guide you through every aspect you’ll need to consider. And if you have trouble staying on track, read and then follow along with this guide to starting a business in 30 days.

As you get your startup or small business up and running, don’t be afraid to reach out to your network for support. It can also be helpful to find a mentor. SCORE provides free business mentorship from experts who have been where you are and want to see you succeed. Good luck!

Maybe you’re ready for a career change.

Maybe you’re still unsure what career to pursue in the first place.

Maybe all you really know is that you want to run your own business, but are fresh out of small business ideas.

While looking at the booming industries year by year can be tempting, it’s also a good idea to look to your strengths. What is your skill set? What are you great at? This can be an excellent jumping-off point for coming up with the best business ideas. By focusing on where your skills are, and what type of thing you enjoy doing, you can come up with great business ideas that truly play to your strengths.

These suggestions should give you somewhere to start.

Did I miss your skill set? What are you great at? Share with me in the comments, or on Twitter, and we’ll continue brainstorming!

If you’re Mr. or Ms. Fix-It:

Does your ideal career involve getting your hands dirty—or, at the very least, working with your hands, as opposed to sitting in an office?

There are, of course, a million possibilities here; however, I’ve researched a few to get you started.

1. Start a plumbing, electric, or “handyman” type business

If you’re a fan of tinkering and solving a problem, starting a plumbing, electrician, or general handyperson-type business might be a good fit for you.

While it’s not as simple as, hey, go start plumbing, if you’re looking for a hands-on career, you might want to consider seeking out a vocational degree in one of these fields and building a business around it. I’ve also linked our free sample plans below, including one specific to starting a plumbing business.

For more information:

• Your local community college is a great place to start when it comes to vocational training, as well as by searching local trade schools in your area
• For further reading, check out this article: How a Self-Employed Handyman Earns $3,000 a Week
• If you’re ready to get started, check out our construction and engineering sample business plans or our plumbing sample business plan
• Look into your state’s requirements for certification for plumbers, electricians, and handy-persons or general contractors.

2. Start a construction business

Similarly, a construction business could be a great fit for someone who enjoys hands-on work.

If you’ve been doing this sort of work for someone else, it can be gratifying to start your own business and be the one calling the shots. If you’re still more of an amateur, you’ll probably need to complete either an apprenticeship or a trade program to get started; however, if you already have some of the skills or have worked construction in the past (or simply have interest in seeking the education), this might be a great fit.

For more information:

• Check your local community college and trade schools in your area for vocational training options
• Read our article on starting a construction company: How to Start a Construction Company
• Check out our complete startup guide: Construction Business Startup Guide
• If you’re ready to dive in, check out our free construction and engineering sample business plans

3. Start a mechanic business

Do you love working on cars? Would you like to do it for a living?

Maybe you’ve been working on cars in your garage for a few years. Don’t write off your interest as merely a hobby; it could make a great small business idea.

For more information:

• Check your local community college and trade schools in your area for vocational training options
• If you’re ready to get started, check out our business plan for an auto repair service business, as well as our auto repair shop business plan

4. Start a sewing and alterations business

If you enjoy sewing, you might like a business specializing in altering or repairing garments.

While you don’t need a specific degree or training, you’ll need a certain level of skill to get started with this one. However, if you’re already great at sewing, an alteration business could be a great fit. It’s a perfect home-based business opportunity, and you’ll have limited overhead—if you have a sewing machine and a good iron, you’re halfway there.

For more information:

• Check out your local community college for sewing classes; your local community center may offer classes as well
• Read our article on how to start a sewing business
• Check out our complete sewing business startup guide
• Head over the Penny Hoarder for this guide on starting an alterations business
• Check out our clothing business sample plans

If you’re a whiz with numbers:

5. Start an accounting business

Do you enjoy bookkeeping, preparing taxes, and generally managing money? Consider starting an accounting business. The field of Strategic Advising is growing, and there is more demand than ever for accountants to provide services beyond just routine tax prep.

Unlike many suggestions on this list, becoming an accountant and opening your own firm will require the right education—generally, you’ll need a bachelor’s degree, and you’ll also likely need to be licensed as a CPA.

For more information:

• The LivePlan Strategic Advisors blog contains great insight and resources for Strategic Advisors and is well worth reading if you’re interested in breaking into the field
• Make sure to read this article from Accounting Web on pitfalls to avoid when starting your own accounting business, so you can make sure you don’t make any easily avoidable mistakes
• If you have questions, the Accounting Coach blog is a great place to go for answers
• Check out our accounting business plans if you’re ready to get started

6. Start a financial planning business

Like starting an accounting business, you’ll want to look into the requirements for starting a financial planning business. However, if you have a background in finance, or would like to pursue the schooling, starting a financial planning business might be the right small business idea for you.

For more information:

• If you’re interested in becoming a certified financial planner, read this guide
• Check out our financial planning business plan
• And, before you get started, make sure you’re ready to go it alone: Going Solo—The True Costs of Starting Your Own Financial Planning Firm

If you’re great at motivating people:

7. Start a personal training business or open a gym

If you’re into some aspect of fitness, opening a gym or starting a personal training business could be a great small business idea. From general fitness coaching to becoming an instructor (think Zumba or Pilates), to personal training, to opening your own gym, there are plenty of options in the fitness sphere, depending on where your interests lie. After all, the best business ideas for you will be the ones that play to your strengths.

Bear in mind that like many options on this list, you’ll need certification. NASM, ACE, and ACSM are a few of the most common and well-respected certifications, but the path you choose will depend on your specific focus.

For more information:

• Check out our article on how to start a gym or fitness center
• We also have a complete startup guide for starting a personal training, gym, or fitness business
• If you’re ready to get started, check out our gym and fitness center business plans
• Check out this article from American Fitness Professionals and Associates: 17 Tips for a Successful Personal Trainer Business
• If you’re interested specifically in becoming a fitness instructor, check out this series of articles: Become a Fitness Instructor

8. Start a life coaching business

Did you successfully navigate a difficult situation against all odds, and come out stronger on the other side? Do you see the best in people, and want to help them reach their full potential? If so, you could consider building a small business around life coaching.

For more information:

• Check out this article: How to Start a Successful Life Coaching Business
• This article by Coach Pony is also worth a (fun) read
• Download and read our psychological health center business plan for planning inspiration

If you’re a strong writer:

9. Start your own freelance writing business

Sites like Elance and Upwork are great places to get started freelance writing, and you can easily build a small business around your skills as a freelance writer, or potentially expand to include other writers (or graphic designers, web designers, and so on) down the road.

Another great thing about starting a freelance writing small business? You can tailor it to your strengths. Whether you’re interested in copywriting, technical writing, or writing for trade publications, writers are always in demand.

For more information:

• Our article on launching a writing business will help you determine if it’s the right path for you
• Check out this article: How to Start a Freelance Writing Business
• Our free sample business plans are a great source of inspiration if you’re ready to get started with the planning process

10. Start an editing and proofreading business

Similarly, editing and proofreading services are always needed and would make a great small business idea. You can begin by taking on freelance work and go from there (and surprise—you’re already a sole proprietor!).

For more information:

• Check out this article by professional proofreader Louise Harnby: Setting Up a Proofreading Business: 10 Things You Need to Know and 10 More You Need to Do
• If you’re ready to get started, check out our free sample business plans or our guide to Lean Planning

11. Start a resume writing and help business

If you have an eye for detail (read: don’t let mistakes go unnoticed!) your skills might be put to good use helping job-seekers perfect their resumes.

For more information:

• Check out this article on starting a freelance resume writing business
• Consider taking the advice of the pros and learn how professional resume writers think you should get started
• Our sample business plans gallery is a good source of inspiration when you’re ready to write a business plan

If you have a green thumb:

12. Start a garden center

If you love gardening, but would rather share your expertise than physically help others with their personal gardens, starting a garden center might be the right small business idea for you. You can advise and educate other enthusiasts on what it takes to make their gardens beautiful.

For more information:

• Start by reading our guide to starting a garden center
• Check out our garden nursery business plan

13. Start a landscaping business

If, on the other hand, you do love the idea of working hands-on, you might consider a landscaping or lawn care business. While you’ll certainly need the skill set to get started, some lawn care services are ultra-basic to start (think mowing) and you can learn and add on more services over time.

For more information:

• Check out this article from The Garden Continuum on starting a landscaping business
• Download and read our landscaping sample business plans

If you love to be creative:

14. Start a photography business

If you’ve got a great eye and are always the one who documents special moments, you might want to consider making a career out of your photography passion.

While the competition is pretty stiff, specializing in a specific area, such as pet photography, weddings, or portraits can help set you apart.

For more information:

• Read our article on how to start a successful photography business
• Check out our complete photography business startup guide
• If you’re ready for business plan inspiration, download and read our photography studio business plan

If you are detail-oriented:

15. Start a car-detailing business

Taking the idea of “detail-oriented” in the most literal sense, a car detailing business could be a small business idea that is not only lucrative, but that plays to your strengths.

For more information:

• Start by reading this article: Five Tips for Starting a Mobile Auto Detailing Business
• If you’re ready to start planning, check out our car wash business plan

16. Start a house cleaning business

If you’re naturally tidy and enjoy keeping places clean, consider starting a house cleaning business. It’s fairly easy to start, requires no training or certification, and if you’re detail-oriented, it could really play to your strengths.

For more information:

• Start with our article on how to start a cleaning business
• Be sure to check out this article from Page’s Cleaning as well
• Check out our cleaning sample business plans

If you excel at making people feel relaxed and beautiful:

17. Start a massage therapy business

While it does take licensing to become a massage therapist, starting a massage therapy business can be a great career for someone who enjoys working with people, and making them feel relaxed and peaceful, or helping them manage pain or injury.

For more information:

• Most cities will have a massage therapy school where you can become an LMT—find one here!
• Our massage business plans will give you inspiration and show you how to get started on your business plan
• If you’re interested in starting a day spa, check out our beauty salon and day spa sample business plans

18. Start a beauty salon or spa

Like a massage therapist, you will need a license to be a hairstylist, esthetician, or nail technician. However, if the training sounds enjoyable, consider looking into starting a salon or spa business.

For more information:

• Find your local cosmetology school to get started on the path to becoming a licensed hairstylist, esthetician, or nail technician
• Second, read our article on how to open a successful hair salon
• Check out our salon business startup guide
• If you’re ready to get started, download and read our hair and beauty salon business plan

If you enjoy helping people:

19. Start a nonprofit

There are endless ways that you can help others by starting a nonprofit business. What problem are you passionate about fixing? Starting a nonprofit business can be a rewarding life path, as it can enable you to both make money and make a difference.

For more information:

• First, read our step-by-step guide on how to start a nonprofit
• For more specifics on writing your business plan, check out: How to Write a Nonprofit Business Plan
• If you’re ready to plan your nonprofit, download and read our free nonprofit sample business plans

If you are a natural teacher:

20. Start a tutoring business

If you know multiple languages, excelled at a certain subject in school, or are good at explaining concepts in a way that is easy to understand, consider starting a tutoring business. You can specialize in a particular area, depending on your skill set, such as paper writing, languages, math, or test preparation—the list goes on.

For more information:

• Start with this article from Side Hustle Nation: How to Start a Tutoring Business
• Check out our education and training sample business plans, specifically our tutoring business plan

21. Start a business teaching your skill set

So, you love to teach—but the idea of rehashing high school chemistry doesn’t really do it for you? Consider starting a business based on teaching what you do love.

Maybe you’re a skilled potter or a trained dancer? Love to practice yoga, and are interested in becoming an instructor? Whatever your skill, there are likely people who’d love a teacher.

For more information:

• To get started, try listing your skills on sites like Craigslist or Thumbtack
• If you’re especially interested in teaching online, this article is a good starting point
• Check out our education and training sample business plans for inspiration, or if you’re ready to get started

If you are a born problem-solver:

22. Build a much-needed app

Do you have the solution to a common problem or pain point that you feel is experienced by many? Consider building an app—it’s easier than you’d think.

For more information:

• To start, find out how you can learn programming and launch your app in three months (no experience required)
• Next, read our interview with Jillian Darlington of Momco, who started an app-based business without a tech background
• Check out our complete SaaS and subscription business guide for more on how to get started

23. Start a consulting firm

Similar to teaching a class based on your skills, you may want to evaluate what you currently excel at, and see if it would make a good consulting business.

Consulting firms exist covering a huge variety of topics, from business, to IT, to public relations, and more. Live and breathe social media? Start a social media consulting business, helping businesses leverage their social presence. You get the idea.

For more information:

• Start with our article on how to start a consulting business
• Check out our free consulting sample business plans

If you are impossibly organized:

24. Start an event planning business

If you get excited over a well-planned itinerary (hey, no judgement—I’m right there with you), you might want to look into starting an event planning business.

From weddings to parties to corporate events, if you can rise above the competition (which is admittedly very present), event planning is an ideal small business idea for the über-organized.

For more information:

• If you’re looking to start an event planning business from your home, check out this article from the Event Manager Blog
• Download and read our personal event planning business plan for inspiration and guidance when you’re ready to plan

25. Start a personal assistant business

Similarly, if you are great at keeping on task and getting things done efficiently and in an organized manner, starting a personal assistant business might be a good fit for you.

For more information:

• This article from The Guardian on how to set up a home-based virtual assistant business is a good place to start
• Self Employed King covers how to be a concierge—starting a personal concierge business
• Our administrative service business plan will help you get started on the planning process

If you enjoy off-hours, early mornings, or late nights:

26. Start a bar, brewery, or a nightclub

If you’re the consummate night owl who enjoys interacting with people, starting a bar or a club might be a great fit for your personality.

No matter where you live, your area is likely full of bars to begin with—so make sure you do your market research. What is your community missing? What kind of place would you personally want to hang out in?

For more information:

• Start with our resource guide on starting a bar or nightclub
• Check out our bar and nightclub sample business plans
• If you’re interested in learning more about the industry, check out the Nightlife Association

27. Start a cafe, bakery, or a coffee shop

On the flip side, do you dream of a job that would leave your evenings free—and love a good cup of coffee and a pastry? Consider starting a coffee shop, a cafe, or a bakery. The food and beverage industry, in general, is a bit of a double-edged sword—perpetually popular, but hard to survive in—so make sure you’ve done your market research and validated your business idea.

For more information:

• Read our article on opening a successful coffee shop, as well as our guide to opening a successful bakery
• Our Bakery Startup Guide and Cafe and Coffee Shop Startup Guide have information on business planning and tips for growing your coffee shop or bakery
• Check out our free restaurant, cafe, and bakery sample business plans
• The American Society of Baking and the National Coffee Association are also worth looking into

28. Open a restaurant

There’s no doubt that the restaurant industry is a difficult one to be successful in. However, if you value a career that is exciting, holds non-standard hours, and lets you fill a need in your community, opening a restaurant might be right for you—just be prepared to work hard to stand out.

For more information:

• The National Restaurant Association is a good place to start your research
• Consider these 39 things to ask yourself before starting a restaurant
• Check out our article on how to start a successful restaurant
• Our sample business plan gallery has several restaurant, cafe, and bakery sample business plans to point you in the right direction when you’re ready to plan your business

If you love caring for others (including four-legged friends):

29. Start a daycare center

If you’re good with children, you’re in luck—childcare is always a needed service.

You also have plenty of options; you could go the full-time nanny route, establish a childcare service out of your home, or rent commercial space, depending on your goals.

For more information:

• Start with our article on how to start a daycare business
• Next, read these tips for writing a successful business plan for a daycare center
• Check out our daycare sample business plans when you’re ready to get started

30. Start a doggy daycare, boarding, or pet grooming business

Do you love animals? Was dog walking your preferred job when you were in high school? Parlay this into a career by starting a pet boarding service, a daytime doggy daycare, or a pet grooming service.

For more information:

• Read about dog walking and boarding business Trots Dogs, whose founder grew a successful dog walking and doggy daycare business from her home
• Next, head over to Rover Time for An Honest Look at Being a Dog Walker
• Check out our dog and cat kennel business plan

31. Start a senior citizen assistance business

Do you have a passion for helping the elderly have a better quality of life? If so, you could start a small business focused on assisting senior citizens.

Whether that be running errands, taking members to social functions, or helping them around the house, there are plenty of options, and starting a business helping others can be deeply rewarding.

For more information:

• Start with our article on starting a home healthcare business
• Make sure you’re aware of the critical risks you might encounter when starting an assisted living home
• Download and read our home health care services business plan, and check out our daycare services and children’s products business plans

If you’re interested in taking advantage of new business trends

32. Consider starting a business in an emerging industry

If you like to be on the cutting edge, consider starting a business in a new, trending industry. It’s a potentially difficult route to take; there’s less precedent, after all, and the roads to success are somewhat unpaved, but in many ways that can be considered a pro.

Consider starting a business in one of these emerging industries:

• How to Open a Marijuana Dispensary
• Bitcoin Business Ideas to Get You Started
• How to Launch a Successful AI Startup

Next steps

If you now have an idea for a business you’d like to start, it’s time to consider where to go next.

We recommend checking out Bplans gallery of sample business plans, which can be a great source of inspiration. Speaking of business planning, you may need to write a formal business plan—here’s our guide on how to write one.

If you’re just looking to validate your idea to start, consider creating a Lean Plan with our Lean Planning Template—it’s faster and easier than a formal business plan, and is a great place to start.

Check out our Idea Validation Checklist as well—it will help you test your business idea to make sure it’s well thought out and likely to be successful. Finally, these tactics will help you validate your idea (and figure out if people will pay for it!), as well as determine if you really want to start a business.

Resources:

• Free Sample Business Plan Gallery
• Idea Validation Checklist
• Lean Planning Template
• Formal Business Plan Template
• The Business Plan Guide
• LivePlan: Easy to use online business planning software

Each day, entrepreneurs of all ages come up with fresh ideas for their new startups. They’re full of excitement and hope. They dream of turning their ideas into thriving businesses.

But the reality is that few of those businesses will succeed. They’ll get started, build some momentum, and then burn out.

It’s tough but true.

The key to being a successful entrepreneur is not just coming up with a great idea—it’s continuing to come up with great ideas, even after failure.

This isn’t easy. It takes courage, determination, and positivity to come back. But if you’re going to find long-term success, you’ve got to dust yourself off and get back to work.

The first step is admitting you have a problem

Are you a bold, determined entrepreneur, willing to fight to see your startup succeed? Excellent, you’ve got the spirit it takes to make it in the cutthroat business world.

But be warned. That stick-to-it attitude comes with a catch—you may also have a hard time knowing when to call it quits on a failed business venture.

Balance your never-give-up mindset with your business-savvy side. Stick to your original business plan. Listen to the advice of co-founders and other confidants. They can help you determine if you should dig in your heels and fight for your business, or if it’s time to admit defeat (at least temporarily until your next business gets started).

Some entrepreneurs have to hit bottom before they can move on to their next venture. That’s what happened to Brickell Men’s Products co-founder Josh Meyer. Now, he’s taking Brickell from a small ecommerce business to an international brand featured in popular men’s magazines.

But it wasn’t always that way. After successfully selling one business, he was running into serious financial trouble with another. In fact, at one point he had basically nothing left in his checking account—not even enough for groceries.

It was time to move on—and that’s where Meyer found huge success. Let’s look at the story of Meyer and Brickell Men’s Products as a case study for knowing when to move on to a new business idea.

Entrepreneurs are problem solvers

Your business should appeal to customers by solving a problem. Maybe it’s one they’ve struggled with for a long time; maybe it’s one they didn’t even realize they had. Regardless, you need to identify that problem and offer the solution.

That’s how Meyer got the idea to start Brickell Men’s Products. About three years ago, his then-girlfriend took a photo of the two of them. When he thought he looked a little off in the picture and asked her why, she said, “Oh, I just touched up some of your wrinkles in Photoshop.”

There was the problem. Wrinkles, before he even hit 30. That led to research into the men’s skincare industry. Here, Meyer unearthed another problem: He discovered that there weren’t any brands offering natural and organic options that resonated with him.

Most of his options were just women’s skincare brands with a few products packaged and marketed to men. But the products themselves weren’t any different from the women’s; there was no distinction about why these men’s products would be better for him. Additionally, the brands didn’t offer any advice on how a guy who had never worried about skincare before could get started.

Voila. Problem identified.

From there, Meyer and his business partner Matt Bolduc got to work on the solution: natural and organic skincare products, designed for men first. They didn’t want to simply copy the many women’s products already on the market. Their goal was natural products with gentle, non-irritating ingredients that could still cleanse and hydrate the skin.

They started with the basics—a face wash and a face moisturizer. They got to researching common ingredients, comparing the products already available on the market, contacting suppliers, and eventually creating and testing their own formulas.

You can find similar success by brainstorming about everyday problems you face. What can you do to make life easier for your potential customers?

This isn’t always easy if you’re still reeling from your last business failure. Don’t hold on to the past. Move forward to your next success.

It starts with brainstorming. Get creative and don’t hold back from researching any plausible idea.

Once you have one or more ideas, start your market research. Is there a viable market? Who are your target customers? How will you convince them to try your new product or service? If you need help validating the demand for your business idea, check out our article on demand validation.

As you develop your new idea, don’t let negativity from your previous failures keep you down. If you realize that one idea isn’t viable, get back to brainstorming. With patience and determination, you can find a hole in the market you can fill and thrive in. For more on validating your business idea, our business idea validation checklist is a download that can help you with this process.

Big idea, small business

Just coming back from watching your business idea fizzle? Did you lose savings in the process? If so, you would do well to start small as you work on creating a new venture.

Fortunately, that’s easy. There are tons of resources to help you launch a bootstrapped business. Not a web design genius? No problem. Use an ecommerce platform that makes the whole process as easy as dragging and dropping. There are tons of ecommerce resources available for new businesses—some free, some paid.

Before you sign up for any service, do your due diligence. Find out what other businesses in your market are using. Read reviews of the most popular platforms, and determine what your budget will allow. That will save you from blowing your budget on services that you might not really need.

Brickell got its start this way. Originally, the “warehouse” was co-founder Matt Bolduc’s garage—but you’d never know from their well-designed website and early feature in Men’s Journal. From those humble beginnings, Brickell is now sold around the world and in luxury retail stores like Bloomingdale’s.

You can do the same. Take your big idea, condense it into a small business, and focus on ecommerce. From there, you can grow your brand into a massive success.

Of course, this requires planning. Don’t dive in without writing a solid business plan. Ask yourself questions to help develop an idea of your future business, like:

• How can I briefly describe my business to others?
• What are the specific products or services will I offer at launch?
• What overhead costs will the business have to deal with at launch?
• How will those costs change as the business grows?
• What is the plan for expansion and further development, assuming the launch is a success?

Savvy marketing and brand building

Learn from your mistakes, and get creative with your next business idea. Don’t limit yourself to markets or industries that you already have lots of experience in. Yes, experience is valuable—but so is leveraging smart marketing skills and knowing how to reach your target customers.

When Meyer and Bolduc first got the idea to start Brickell Men’s Products, they weren’t skincare experts. But they did know their ideal customer very well—guys just like them.

Doing the research into skincare products and natural ingredients wasn’t easy. It took time and hard work—investigating the ideal ingredients, communicating with manufacturers, and testing formulas.

But creating a quality product isn’t enough to equate to success. Focusing on marketing, especially when you’re launching an ecommerce site, is important. But your marketing strategy doesn’t have to rely on the traditional methods—like print, broadcast, direct mail, and telephone marketing. Businesses built on ecommerce need to make modern digital marketing their priority. This includes content marketing with a blog, building an email subscriber list, and developing a social presence for the brand.

Meyer and Bolduc always knew that men’s skin care products are not likely to be shared publicly (much less virally) by their customers. Most guys keep their skincare concerns pretty hush-hush.

At the same time, there’s no denying that the men’s skincare industry is growing. Market forecasters have predicted that the men’s personal care market will reach $166 billion globally by 2022. Plus, from their own experiences, they knew that guys want to better understand and improve their skin. The market research agreed. Trends show a growing interest in anti-aging products and an expanding global middle class willing to spend more on luxury products.

So they positioned themselves as experts in the field, willing to share helpful information with guys like them. Marketing became less about direct sales and more about education.

Alongside the launch of their first products, they published blog posts with detailed instructions on how to use each one of the specific benefits. They also emailed the guides to customers upon purchase. That lead to brand loyalty and further interest in the products themselves.

This approach—tailor-made for their market—might not work for your business. But the lesson is clear: Design your marketing to appeal to your target customers, not to follow some old-school blueprint.

For Meyer and Bolduc, this meant using their experience with previous business failures. They considered what had worked, what had failed, and why. They combined the data from market research with their own instincts to create a marketing plan and brand message that would resonate with their target market.

Don’t be limited to only imitating other business’s methods for success. Learn from others, get professional advice and guidance, and do your due diligence on the market—but don’t ignore your instincts. An approach that encompasses all of these factors is most likely to succeed.

Stay positive

You can come back from a failed business idea, stronger than ever. Don’t come crawling back—emerge from the wreckage with fresh determination.

Use the lessons learned by others, like Meyer and Bolduc, to inspire your next move. Don’t let a previous failure stop you from developing your next big idea.

Invest conservatively in your new startup as you develop a smart business plan. Thoroughly research your potential markets to see where you can fill a hole and find success.

Don’t be afraid to scrap a bad idea in favor of a new opportunity. As you move on from previous failures, stay determined to make your next big idea into a business success.

We were wrong.

Markets and businesses always evolve. Xerox, Polaroid, Blockbuster, and other market leaders lost to smaller, more agile competitors because the market leaders assumed that they would dominate forever.

1. Find a way to compete with yourself

In early 2016, I took my senior team offsite for one week to consider the following question: “If we started a new business today to compete with crowdSPRING and our key competitors, how would we build it?”

I asked similar questions at many prior quarterly meetings over the years, but in the past, we paid mostly lip service to the answers, making modest changes to our product and operations.

This time was different.

I told the senior team that this time, we would begin the process of completely overhauling our business the day after we returned from our off-site.

This wasn’t going to be a hypothetical discussion that would result in small tweaks to our business. We would look at everything and then we would execute.

We spent a week focusing on every aspect of our business and product. We scrutinized what worked and what didn’t work, evaluated our team to assess whether we had the right team to accomplish our goal, and questioned every assumption we made about our business and our market.

By the end of the off-site, we built a plan to completely reimagine our business. We called it crowdSPRING 3.0.

We committed to changing every pixel, every line of code, and every word of copy. We looked at pricing, our policies, our communications, marketing, customer service—we left nothing untouched.

We’re a few months away from launching the new product (and relaunching crowdSPRING in the process) and I want to share what we’ve learned (the good and the bad) along the way.

2. Empower each person on your team

When we began the process of reimagining our business, I knew we would need every person on the team to contribute. Our team is small—nine people—but we have a community of over 250,000 clients, designers, and writers, from nearly every country in the world. We could not reimagine our business unless every person on the team was actively involved.

To get everyone involved, I split the process into logical pieces and asked every person on the team to become the CEO of part of the process. Communication was critical—both when we initially started down the road to reimagine our business and throughout the process. This is not surprising; communication is perhaps the most important skill every successful leader must have.

One person was in charge of how we qualified designers and writers to work on crowdSPRING. Another person was in charge of the types of logo design, web design, graphic design, industrial design, naming and writing projects we offered in our legacy product, and whether we would offer the same types of projects in crowdSPRING 3.0. A third person was responsible for looking at our business intelligence tools. Every person on the team was involved.

We deconstructed every part of our business and someone owned the research and analysis to help us reimagine each function. Each person was empowered to research, propose a solution, and oversee implementation.

For example, someone from our customer support team took a critical look at how we qualified designers and writers to work on crowdSPRING. Historically, designers and writers could register with only their email and they could work on any project on crowdSPRING. But we realized, during our off-site, that although our goal was good—to create a level playing field for creatives around the world—we compromised our ability to control quality.

I knew that developing a new registration system would take some time. The person who “owned” this part of our reimagination process strongly advocated that we close registration for designers and writers until we could completely rethink the entire process, and rebuild it.

3. Let people make tough decisions

When you make a person the “CEO” of something, you give them the authority to find the best solution to a problem. Giving people authority means you have to fight the urge to micromanage, even if that’s your typical style of leadership.

This was easy for me to do because I don’t micromanage, but many people worry about ceding authority to someone else. If you trust someone to oversee a critical part of your business, you should trust them to make good decisions. Not only that, when people make great decisions, give them lots of public praise—don’t steal the spotlight.

I didn’t take the proposal to close registration lightly, but after discussing it with the team, we did just that. Registration remained closed for nearly six months while we gathered a waiting list of thousands of new designers and writers who wanted to work on crowdSPRING (we’ve since qualified and processed every single person on that waiting list—an effort that took a lot of time).

After we closed our registration system, the person overseeing how we qualified designer and writers proposed a new registration system, completely reimagining how we registered people for the prior eight years. This new system would require real identification, contact information, and work samples in certain categories of projects (including logo design, web design, and company naming). We wanted to be sure that the designers and writers we admitted to work on crowdSPRING met our minimum standards for quality and trust.

Our customer support team strongly urged us to apply these rules retroactively to all 200,000 creatives on crowdSPRING and we did so, requiring every designer and writer to re-register and re-qualify.

This process helped us to create a much better product but it also had an interesting side-effect. Making every person on the team the CEO of something important empowered each person and collectively, empowered the entire team in ways we had not imagined.

People knew that we were relying on them to do important research, to make important recommendations, and to closely oversee the changes we would implement. They also knew that they had true freedom to make decisions and suggest radical changes in the way we ran our business.

Every person on the team became a leader and this has flattened our organization and has helped us to move faster.

4. Empowering people spurs innovation

Empowering the team by giving each person control over a specific aspect of the business also created an opportunity for people to be creative, without constraints.

During our one week off-site, we committed to questioning everything about our business. This process allowed us to return to our startup roots, where innovation is king.

A company that has been in business for nearly 10 years is hardly a startup. Many processes are already established and it’s more difficult to be agile. That’s why bigger companies look at startups to learn about innovation.

This is precisely why companies that have been in business for years should critically look at their business and consider ways they would compete with themselves.

Some of the ideas developed during our off-site and shortly after were implemented immediately, even before we completely rebuilt our product and business. We launched a resource center for entrepreneurs and small businesses, and started a video series on YouTube focusing on starting and growing your business.

Our one week off-site breathed new life into our drive to be the innovation leader in our space. That’s a position we occupied for the first three to four years after we started the business and we firmly believe we’ll again become a market leader in a few months when we relaunch our business and our product.

5. You’ll make mistakes along the way

I don’t want you to walk away thinking that this reimagination process was 100 percent positive. I made a number of mistakes along the way. If you decide to reimagine your own business, I hope you learn from these mistakes.

Mistake #1: Failing to critically assess every person on our team

I didn’t do a good job assessing our team after we came back from the off-site.

I believed that we had a strong team that could quickly adapt to new technologies. As a result, I didn’t look as critically as I should have at each person on the team, to decide whether they would be a good fit for where our business was heading.

We were going to move in a different direction, both with our product and with the pace of our business. I assumed that everyone could easily adapt and evolve. The most effective employees share certain traits—and I unfortunately ignored a few.

This mistake set us back about three months and created a great deal of friction when we started to rebuild the product. When we finally realized that we would need to make changes, we took a detour and made those changes. I’m very happy with the results but wish I took a more critical look at our team before we started this process.

Mistake #2: Underestimating the software development process

We also underestimated the time it would take us to rebuild the product.

During our off-site, we were so energized by the opportunity to completely rethink our business that we thought we could complete a full rebuild within three to four months.

We were not eating magic mushrooms, but it sure seems like it now. We have a large marketplace, with billions of database objects, hundreds of thousands of customers, designers, and writers, and a complex infrastructure.

We grossly underestimated the complexity of the rebuild and the careful planning that was necessary to get started.

We should have known this would be a problem. Software development is unpredictable and people regularly underestimate how long it would take to build (or rebuild) a product.

When we realized that it would take us longer than we originally anticipated, we had to reset our expectations, accelerate certain projects on the legacy site (which we mostly left untouched because we were building a completely new product), and reexamine our marketing campaigns.

Had we more accurately anticipated the time it would take us to rebuild the product, we would have planned better and would not have needed to take valuable time away from the rebuild process.

Mistake #3: Neglecting to create a “Plan B”

We made another critical mistake when we started the rebuilding process: We didn’t create a “Plan B.”

This was surprising, because I think it’s important to create an alternative plan that you can follow if you first plan fails. After all, whether you’re building software, marketing, or selling, it’s not unusual for your strategy to fall flat or fail. When it does—and this happens often—smart companies already know their next best alternative.

I was so focused on the rebuild process that I never asked the team in the early months of our rebuild and reimagination process to consider what we would do if the rebuild process took considerably longer than three to four months.

As a result, we created strategies and tactics for marketing campaigns we would launch in four months, deferred numerous campaigns and changed others, and otherwise threw a wrench into our marketing plan in 2016. The launch date became a moving target and this meant that we could not effectively execute many of our planned campaigns.

When I realized that the process would take considerably longer than we originally anticipated, I met with my senior team and we discussed what we can do to move forward on our marketing strategies.

After all, it made no sense to hold back our marketing if we had to wait six months or more for the new product to be ready for launch.

We created a three month plan (assuming we would launch in three months) and a six months “Plan B” (what we would do if we couldn’t launch in three months and had to wait six months).

Thinking through each strategy—three months and six months plans—allowed us to more accurately assess our marketing strategies and their timing based on our ability (or inability) to complete and launch the new product.

Had we done this early in the process, we would not have lost important months of marketing time when we were holding many of our campaigns back because we thought our relaunch was imminent.

What’s holding you back?

If you have a newer business not performing to your satisfaction, or an older business that has hit a wall, you too can benefit from asking the question:

“If I started a new business today to compete with my existing business and my key competitors, how would I build it?”

What are you waiting for?