Looking around, you’ll find many success stories from entrepreneurs. These are stories of how they built their businesses from the ground to a large entity.
Without scaremongering though, there are just as many little-known stories of businesses that failed. In fact, fully half of businesses fail within 5 years.
As an aspiring entrepreneur, there’s no doubt that you want to build a successful business. And to achieve this, you need knowledge.
From starting to scaling to contributing to the greater good of the world, you have to learn and use the right tools along the way.
In this blog post, discover 10 resources you need to improve your chances of success as a new entrepreneur:
Inc.
As one of the most popular American magazines, Inc. provides insights about businesses. It also releases the Inc. 500 and 5000 lists which contain the fastest-growing American companies.
Apart from the magazine, Inc. provides relevant information for entrepreneurs on its website every day. In fact, Inc. has a startup page on its website which provides content about funding, best industries, and business plans.
Through the website and magazine, you’ll get current information about the startup world. Surely, these are pieces of information that will help your business grow.
Bplans
Starting a business without a business plan is like going to an unknown city without a map. You’ll likely get lost.
First, a business plan helps you to map out every aspect of your business operations from your products to financing to profitability. Second, a business plan is vital to securing financing through bank loans or investors.
Fortunately, Bplans provides over 500 business plan templates across different business types. Moreso, you’ll find other templates such as SWOT analysis templates, pitch presentation templates, one-page business plan, and more.
Odoo Scale-up!
Running a business in the real world means there’s always a risk of losing money. But what if you can learn about running a business without the risk of losing money?
That’s what Odoo Scale-up! can help you achieve. With this game, you can simulate 7 different business cases. These include retail, manufacturing, eCommerce, etc.
For every business case, there are 8 to 10 cards. So all you have to do is pick a card, and provide the relevant solution to the situation. After this, you can then compare your solution to the game’s.
Using all the business cases, you can build a business from scratch until it becomes successful. Undoubtedly, this provides a lot of valuable lessons with no risk.
Freshbooks
Accounting is a boring but necessary part of running a business. After all, you have to manage cash flow and ensure your business is making profits.
Freshbooks allows you to create accounting reports such as balance sheets, expense reports, profit & loss, etc. Furthermore, FreshBooks makes invoicing easy while creating invoices for your clients.
With its mobile apps, it’s easy to add new details like expenses through your smartphone. It also has time tracking features that allow you to track time spent on tasks by your employees. This is great if you pay by the hour.
To make payment tracking easier, FreshBooks allows you to integrate with other platforms such as Stripe, PayPal, G Suite, Shopify, etc. Finally, you can export your reports in CSV and other popular formats.
HubSpot blog
Even though HubSpot provides inbound marketing tools for businesses, it also has a huge library of helpful information for businesses.
The HubSpot blog provides content in 4 major categories which are:
- Marketing: in this category, you’ll find insights and ideas about how to market your business to attract more leads and customers.
- Sales: here, you’ll find information about how to close your prospects without being too “salesy.”
- Service: serving your customers can help them use your product better, turn them to loyal customers, and brand evangelists. You can find content on how to achieve that here.
- Website: this section provides valuable insights on how to build your website.
By reading the HubSpot blog, you’ll find information that can help every aspect of your business.
FindLaw Small Business Law
One aspect of business operations that most entrepreneurs struggle with is the legal processes. You have to register your business, hire employees, obtain financing, choose insurance policies, and file taxes.
This can lead to a headache fast. However, FindLaw has a small business law page where they provide valuable resources just to help new entrepreneurs with these issues.
The FindLaw Small Business Law page tackles issues such as:
- Incorporation and legal structures
- Employment law and human resources
- Intellectual property
- Business finances
- Business contracts and forms
- Business liability and insurance
And there are even more. For most questions you might have about the legal side of your business, you’ll likely find an answer here.
Coursera
Founded by Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng in 2012, Coursera has become one of the most popular platforms for taking online courses. How does this help you as an aspiring entrepreneur?
You’ll find courses about entrepreneurship and growing a business. And the beauty of these courses is that they’re offered by prestigious institutions of learning such as Stanford University and Princeton University or big companies such as Google and IBM.
Whether you want a paid or a free course, you’ll find many great courses where experts teach you about building successful businesses. For instance, see a free Entrepreneurship course offered by UPenn’s Wharton School of Business:
Monday.com
Becoming an entrepreneur means you have to manage people to achieve results in different aspects of your business. Having a team and project management tool such as Monday.com will help you manage these activities without burning out.
Furthermore, the software provides templates such as:
- Freelancers
- Marketing
- Design
- Content production
- Project management
With these templates, it becomes easier to manage these types of projects. Also, the simple and intuitive interface allows you to see a timeline of your projects, assign tasks to team members, and track the progress of each team member with their tasks.
To use Monday.com along with other tools you need for business, you can integrate with Slack, Excel, Google Drive, Zapier, etc.
Y Combinator
Except you’re a billionaire, every new entrepreneur will need funding at some point during their business operations. There are many options such as finding investors, crowdfunding, bootstrapping, using an incubator/Accelerator, etc.
Y Combinator is one of the most popular startup accelerators that provide seed funds to new businesses. Since 2005, Y Combinator has funded startups such as Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox that went on to become multi-billion dollar companies.
Currently, the accelerator provides $150,000 to many startups twice a year. All you have to do is pitch your wonderful idea and you could get this seed fund to grow your business.
Apart from the seed fund, Y Combinator also provides guidance to companies and introduces them to investors.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
What happens when you face difficult situations that every business inevitably faces? When you’re damned whether you do or don’t?
In this popular book, Ben Horowitz uses his experience as a start-up founder and venture capitalist to advise aspiring entrepreneurs on how to build a successful start-up. This includes how to take care of your employees, lay off workers, deal with investors, and more.
From this book, you’ll get clues about difficult situations in business that people rarely talk about.
Conclusion
Becoming an entrepreneur takes a lot of guts, planning, and becoming a voracious learner. These resources have been compiled to improve various aspects of your business.
Exploit this list to increase your chances of becoming a successful entrepreneur.
young entrepreneur -DepositPhotos
