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Small-Business Owner’s Guide To Government Resources
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Article 3: Small Business Startup Guide
A logical starting place for startup businesses is the SBA’s small business startup guide. It provides an overview of virtually every path you will travel during and after launching your business. You can find it here: http://www.sba.gov/starting_business/startup/guide.html
This online guide steps the business rookie interactively through all the phases of business creation. The SBA likes to say, “It is both comprehensive and easy to use.” Don’t get the impression that its ease of use means it is superficial.
The small business startup guide is indeed a powerful tool that will steer you at your own pace through necessary decisions and choices, many of them things that you might otherwise overlook. The guide includes hyperlinks for supplemental information and other resources when you’re ready to add to your basic knowledge.
The first section, “Ask Yourself,” is the type of self-evaluation that too many new business owners give too little consideration. You’ll be asked elementary – yet vital – questions such as:
“Are you a selfstarter?” “How well do you get along with different personalities?” “How good are you at making decisions?”
These questions force wannabe business owners to come to grips with basic personality traits. And your answers can alert you to fatal mistakes before you leap into a decision that you may not have entirely thought through.
But the guide isn’t merely a tool for screening out people unsuited for entrepreneurship. It is primarily a tool to help you focus on what you want to do.
You will be methodically stepped through the preliminaries, such as what goes into a business plan and how to determine you market niche. You’ll then move to later stages, such as options for raising startup money and meeting all necessary governmental regulations for your field.
Appropriate to the guide’s first-things-first approach is a glossary of business terms that will arm you with enough insider jargon that you can understand unfamiliar words or familiar words used in unfamiliar ways. Don’t give short shrift to this element. Knowing the difference between a “charged off loan” and a “closed loan” is not just a matter of verbiage. It’s a matter of dollars and cents.
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