First Step Marketing

Many of you are purchasing or taking over an existing business. Thus the business will not be experiencing its grand opening or its first week. However, it will still be your beginning, and you’ll be encountering a lot of things for the first time. Therefore most of the following applies as much to you as it would to a start-up.

There are two kinds of grand openings. One is a special promotion called a “Grand Opening.” If you’ve established a business that depends on walk-in traffic, you’ll undoubtedly want to use your opening as an excuse to have a grand-opening promotion. Whatever you do, don’t do this on your first day. You’ll have plenty of time to do this promotion after you’ve worked the kinks out of your operation and had enough time to properly plan such an event.

The other grand opening is your first day of business. Put on your seat belt. You are about to begin the ride of your life.

Wow! If you’d only known it would be this much work just to get to opening day! Let’s check off the list of things you should have done before opening your doors for the first time.

1. Created a simple business plan that includes your mission statement, your strategy, and your budget.
2. Secured a location.
3. Contacted vendors for the products and services you will need and established their willingness to supply you.
4. Hired the necessary staff for the opening.
5. Determined the business form you will use and taken care of the necessary legal requirements to establish the business.
6. Secured the necessary government licenses, permits, etc. At the top of the list would be business license, sales tax permit, tax ID number, and any special licenses or permits specific to your type of business.
7. Purchased and installed the necessary equipment and fixtures. You may need to plan your phone and fax purchase and installation months in advance. It is a complicated and time-consuming project.
8. Opened a checking account and established a banking relationship.
9. Secured firm delivery dates for your opening inventory. Don’t forget forms, stationery, and other incidentals necessary to the conduct of business (such as pens).
10. Established contact with potential customers or clients through advertising, mailings, or personal calls to let them know you are about to open.
11. In some instances you may wish to have secured orders or contracts in advance of opening.
12. Contracted for Yellow Pages advertising if appropriate.
13. Determined your operating procedures. Such things as hours, pricing procedure, purchasing method, invoicing procedure, terms and conditions of sale, warranties and guarantees, return authorizations, bookkeeping system, and filing.

Let me guess that you were doing just fine until number 13. While no amount of planning will result in every base being covered on day one, there is much you should do to appear professional and to avoid losing sales and profit needlessly.

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Last-Minute Checklist

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 3:03 am and is filed under Advertising, Banking, Budgeting, Business Plans, Legal, Promotion, Sales, Tax. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.