Your new business idea is great. Everyone you’ve talked to has said it’s a great idea and they don’t know why it doesn’t exist yet. You’re excited. You’re driven. You’re determined. This is brilliant. We love to see this. But before you rush out of the starting gate, maybe take a pen and paper and make a little list of these 4 things. They’re the kinds of things that people tend not to think about while they’re getting started, but they’re things that are far easier to correct now than later.
1. Make sure your name isn’t taken.
This one feels like it’s the most obvious, but you’d be surprised. Google the name you’ve chosen. Is there already a business in your field (or a similar field) that has the same name, or a name similar enough to mistake the two? If you want to open a tattoo parlour called “Inks and Things”, and there’s already a tattoo parlour in the next town over called “Inky Things”, you might want to reconsider that name. Not only will it make it hard to market your new company, but it might make trademarking the name down the line a bigger headache than it needs to be. This is less of an issue if the company has a similar name, but is in a totally different industry. If “Inky Things” isn’t a tattoo parlour, but a print shop, you might be okay. It’s not ideal, but it’s better.
And while you’re googling the name, you might also want to check website addresses and social media handles. There’s a tool out there called namecheckr.com that can check most social media sites, as well as some common domain names. It has a bit of issue with Twitter/X after some recent API changes, so you may need to manually check that one, but it’s a great way to see at a glance whether or not your name is available on all the common (and some uncommon) social media sites.
In the event that it is taken on one or two of them, my biggest piece of advice is to find ONE NAME that is available on ALL the social media you intend to use. Going back to our example, if your name is “Inks and Things”, and your twitter is “@InksandThings”, your Instagram is “@Inks_and_Things”, your TikTok is “@InksAndThingsTattoo” and your Youtube Channel is “@InksAndThings_Manchester”, then you have made yourself absolutely invisible. Yes, you can create a linktree to put them all together, but the ideal solution is finding one single username that is available everywhere, even if it’s a little less perfect than you’d want. Being “@InksAndThingsMCR” everywhere is far easier for you and your potential clients than being one perfect name somewhere and a bunch of derivations of it everywhere else.
2. Put into writing the way that you are Useful to your clients.
So, your new business. What makes it different to every other business out there in your industry? What are the three adjectives that set you apart from everyone else in your industry? And no, the words “passionate” and “customer-focused” don’t count. If you weren’t passionate, you wouldn’t be doing any of the hard work of setting up a business, so that goes without saying. And being customer focused is kind of the bare minimum that your customers expect? If I were giving you money for a thing, and I was just an afterthought, I would go somewhere else.
You need to know what your USP is before you start marketing, otherwise you will go into the world directionless. And while conventional wisdom says that USP stands for “Unique Selling Point”, I prefer to re-frame it as “Useful Selling Point”, as not all uniqueness is useful. A tattoo shop where all the tattoo artists are squids would be unique, but not good, and not useful.
To use myself as an example, my artwork is guided by the personality and history of the person behind the business, as well as the business itself. I take my history of stagecraft — specifically stage magic and pro-wrestling — to develop an approach to branding that is very “character-focused”. This is unique and useful, especially with small businesses, as most of the time the entire business is just them! This also means that the results are truly unique compared to the rest of their industry, which makes them stand out among the crowd to potential customers in a way that feels personal and positive.
Knowing your Useful Selling Point can be the starting point of your entire marketing campaign, since once you know what makes you Useful, you can start thinking about who can get use out of that. And they are the people you need to market to, because you cannot market to everyone. No single marketing message appeals to everyone, regardless of what your product is. And the secret is, you don’t need to market to everyone. There are 8 billion people on the planet, and you can market yourself to a tiny, miniscule fraction of them and still be wildly successful. Finding and untapped niche in the market, and marketing effectively to them is the key.
It can also really help in finding what exactly you want to offer, because just as you cannot market to everyone, you cannot do everything, and that’s a good thing. Find one thing that you’re very good at doing, and find people who need it doing, and do that one thing for them. For example, Instagram was great when it was just photos, and it did photos really well. Then it tried to also be Tiktok and Snapchat and eBay and WhatsApp and the app got worse and worse until something had to give. They expanded too far and stretched themselves too thin. You don’t need to do the same thing.
3. Define The Voice of your Business
So by now, especially if you’ve read my other posts here, you can tell that the voice of me and my business is incredibly casual and conversational. That’s not just because I don’t know how to be formal and haven’t written a proper essay since I left Uni, but because I’ve found that both me and my clients are far more comfortable if I speak and act in this way. And being an artist, I get more leeway to side-step “professional business” behaviours. Lucky me.
But this was something I definitely thought about, and it’s something you should think about too. It will make writing copy for your website, your social media posts and messages with clients far easier, and will also make them feel coherent. In my last article, I talked about the importance of getting a firm colour scheme and font scheme for your visual identity, and this works in exactly the same way, but with writing. If every social media post and website page feels like it’s written by a different person in a different voice, then something will feel nebulously “off” when reading it, and your client base will catch on to that even if they can’t quite pinpoint what feels off about it. If you’re going into accounting, or something legal, then you might want to speak and write in a more formal, traditional style (Unless, of course, part of your unique offering is that you avoid all of that jargon and formality)
Additionally, if your business appeals to multiple demographics, it’s important to define a distinct voice for each of them. I was recently speaking with someone who works for a company that has different services for adults and young people, however it’s clear from the marketing materials the that team are far more comfortable writing copy for adults than they are for children. As a result, the marketing materials for children come out strangely wordy, both saying too much and nothing at all. The marketing team need to define the differences between the voices, to make sure effective communication was happened to both audiences.
4. Know when to stop.
This one, sadly, is kind of a bummer ending. Sorry about that. But people will tell you that tenacity and determination against all obstacles is what makes a good entrepreneur, that the “never-say-die” attitude is what makes people successful. And I’m here to tell you that they are wrong. It’s an oversimplified attitude that drives people deeper into debt, despair and unhappiness. One of your key notes when starting the business is knowing the signals to call it quits. I gave myself three metrics when starting that I still hold strong today. If any of these three things happen, I need to call it quits:
- If I ever go 8 weeks without acquiring a new client or invoice payment
- If I ever, outside of periods of low mental health, dread opening my laptop and starting work
- If my partner consistently tells me I complain about my working too much
Those last two may sound like silly metrics, but I started my business because I love creating artwork, logos, branding. So if I don’t love it anymore, why should I continue? The first one, however, is very important and even if you don’t have any other metrics, you need to know your firm “this is how long I can stand being broke” point is. And that point can be from a financial standpoint or a mental health one. But you need to know the signal for when to stop.
If you’ve done all these things, then congratulations, you’re ready to start your business! If you want to get started on the right foot with a spectacular suite of Visual Identity and Branding assets, then talk to me! You can find my work at edenmw.com, and email hello@edenmw.com for more information!
