How to Start a Consulting Business
10 step complete guide for starting a consulting business from scratch.
Business finance is the use of your company’s financial information to help you manage your money and make your business operations profitable and sustainable.
You need to determine how you’re going to fund your new business and how you’ll grow it. If you don't understand the numbers, you’ll have a tough time building a sustainable, profitable business.
One way you can determine the amount of money you need is to perform a break-even analysis.
There are many reasons you should conduct a break-even analysis. The most important reason when starting a new business is to determine profitability for your business.
You can also perform break-even analysis when you price a product or service, taking into account fixed rates, variable costs, and competitive pricing.
Finally, you can perform a break-even analysis to analyze your data to determine how much volume of sales you’ll need to be profitable.
A break-even analysis is a financial tool that helps you determine at what stage your company, service, or product will be profitable. It’s an essential element of financial planning. Break-even analysis considers your fixed costs (costs that stay the same no matter how much your sales change), your variable costs (based on sales), and the average price (the average amount that your competitors price for their products or services).
The break-even analysis formula is Fixed Costs / (Average Price - Variable Costs) = Break-Even Point.
To start a new business, your costs may include: design (your logo, business cards, website), licenses and permits, rent, utilities, marketing and advertising, manufacturing, salaries and wages, etc.
Once you know how much it will cost to get you started, compare that with the funds you have. Then plan how you’ll make up any difference.
But be realistic. For example, many companies offer small business loans, but they’re often expensive, require personal guarantees, and require you to be already operating profitably for a number of years.
Consider ways to leverage third parties to help you get your products or services to market more quickly. For example, traditional product design firms typically charge $50,000 to $100,000 (and often more) to help you design a physical product. You can save tens of thousands of dollars by working with experienced product designers on crowdspring to get a custom, professional product design.
Run smart calculations to determine how much it will cost to create your business will allow you to plan and think about pricing.
Be extra careful to conserve your funds when starting a business. Don’t overspend.
Some purchases will be necessary and will make sense for your business, but others, like expensive and unnecessary equipment, will threaten your business’s survivability.
In order to keep track of your finances, you’ll need to set up a bookkeeping and accounting system. This is important so that you understand your business’s cash flow and will also be important for tax-filing purposes. Your accounting and bookkeeping system will include income, expenses, capital expenditures, profit, loss, EBITDA, etc. For more, look at the section of this guide that focuses on business accounting and bookkeeping.
Be sure you find a strong banking partner. For most businesses, the best banking partner is a smaller community bank. That’s because smaller community banks understand local market conditions and are built to service smaller businesses.
You don’t want to be one of a million business customers with a major national bank – you won’t get their attention and will quickly get lost in the crowd. This is especially important if you want to build a close relationship with a bank. For more, look at the section of this guide that focuses on how to find a great bank for your new business.
10 step complete guide for starting a consulting business from scratch.
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Choose from 30+ categories, complete a project brief, and pick a package that fits your budget.
Collaborate with dozens of creatives, give feedback and score, and get revised custom designs.
Work with the winner to finalize your favorite design and get print/web-ready files and full IP rights.
Not into crowds?
Pick a creative and work 1-to-1
Crowdspring is an online design platform linking businesses like yours with over 220,000 design and naming experts. Instead of investing over $10,000 with a branding agency - or paying an unknown freelancer for a single design you hope you like - crowdspring delivers dozens of custom designs to choose from for every project. With over 12 years of experience, we’re the reliable, affordable solution for small business.
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There are many ways to start a new business with no money. The most effective, for many people, is to bootstrap their new startup until they can transition to working on the new business full time.
You can assess what you can do for free, build up some savings, ask friends and family for a loan or investment, apply for a small business loan, look for small business grants or other funding opportunities, and find potential angel investors.
Here’s a video with 5 tips on how you can bootstrap your new business, even if you don’t have money to start it right away.
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