The whole "Be your own boss" thing isn't as glamorous as the rich looking Lamborghini guy made it seem. To be honest, it's very hard and we can attest to that. Over 75% of new businesses don't survive beyond their first year and less than 5% of new businesses make it to their 5th year.
There are numerous reasons for this, but oftentimes it's because the founders didn't have a clear strategy or they didn't lay a solid foundation for their business. More importantly, many lack the tenacity required to keep going and hence it takes considerable grit to join the 1%.
In this article we'll cover a few tips to help you start your business off on the right foot using the Asaqeni Web app. We'll help you come up with a strategy as well as a roadmap to achieving that vision.
Setting up your account in Asaqeni
The Asaqeni Business Suite is a comprehensive set of tools and resources designed to guide founders and small business owners as they start and grow their businesses. You can sign up to Asaqeni Business Suite here.
After you've signed up to Asaqeni and completed all the house keeping stuff, you will be prompted to select a mode. The screen looks like the one below:
This allows you to choose whether you will create your own company profile or join an existing one(if your co-founders beat you to it). Select Founder and you will be redirected to your company details page. This will provide Asaqeni with the information required to create your action plan(more on that later). Enter the relevant details and save.
After saving your company details, you will be redirected to the Team Members section. Here you will be prompted to enter your details as a founder. The screen will look as shown below and that includes your role in the organisation, amount of ownership and your social media handles.
After saving your details, you can go on and add your employees(if any) and your co-founders.
NB- This info will be only visible to you and is not connected to any other user accounts.
Once your data has been saved, you will note that some sections will have been auto completed for you. Particularly your Cap-Table and Action plan.
Ps~ These are accessible from the sidebar on the left
The image below shows a section of the action plan.
Setting your primary goal
Once your account and company are set up, the real work begins- building your business. The first major step is identifying your North Star metric. This is one metric upon which the success of your entire business depends. For example, if you're running a restaurant, this will be orders or bookings. If you run a transport and logistics company, this could be loads. If you're an SAAS platform then this could be the number of subscribers or paid users.
In your dashboard, click the "Set a goal" button. Can you spot it in the screen below?
This will open the following screen. In our example we've chosen Subscribers as our metric. The target value should be an amount that will take your business to its next stage. Depending on the nature of your business, you could start with a smaller number like, say, 1000 subscribers.
Once your primary metric has been set, you will need to add weekly updates. These will determine whether your business is making progress or not.
What's next?
Continue working on your business using the steps given in the action plan. Adapt them to suit your needs and make adjustments to your details Visit the dashboard regularly to update your progress and explore the various tools which have been carefully curated to help you think through each step and make better business decisions.
We hope you found this guide helpful.
Please remember to share it with a friend or loved one who's starting a business. Also remember to like and follow @asaqenibusiness on social media. We regularly post all sorts of content to help new business owners start and grow their businesses.