Get your business up and Running

The conventional fast tracks for entrepreneurs in a hurry are either buying an existing business or buying a franchise. They share a common element: in both cases you buy your way in, and that need capital.

By far the fastest, and perhaps the cheapest way to get up and running is to start an business, the big ecommerce providers claim, with some justification, that you can have your online shop, or ecommerce site up and running in a single day but is that an online business?

A realistic plan for a start-up must have several stages, and you may well have to go through each stage more than once before you can really commit to any one path. Having said that, a web site is cheap to run and relatively simple to set up, and as Google and the others seem to rate the 'age' of a site, and the number of inward links it enjoys as elements in its page ranking there are benefits of getting your site up and running as soon as possible.

So what are the stages in the business design loop?

1. Think out your 'product' and develop a preliminary USP

2. Do preliminary the market research to evaluate that your clients will be, who you are in competition with, how with you deliver your products or services

3. Plan how you will establish yourself in a competitive market, will you be the cheapest, the quickest; provide the most complete packages etc

4. Think of your proposal as an ongoing operation. How will you source your products or services? How will you store it etc?

5. When you've thought this through, estimate your revenue and your costs and make a first projection of the business. Plan it month by month. When will your costs and your revenues come in, how much money you must lie out before revenues and costs match, and how much money you will need to bridge the gap.

6. How will you manage the business? Will you be a sole trader, a company, a partnership?

7. Write all this up as a preliminary business plan and if it looks OK at this stage think about setting up the online shop of ecommerce site.

Remember now that the site itself has an evolutionary process to go through before it becomes an asset rather than a liability. The process takes time and this time can be usefully exploited to go through the stages above again and perhaps again, refining your work each time with the products of the previous round.

So what are the on-site stages? They too form a loop.

1. Decide the look and function of your site. Are you actually selling from it? Is it inviting visitors to make contact?

2. Decide on providers, internet hosts, payment services (PayPal?).

3. Set up your preliminary site with mission statements (derived from your USP) and some preliminary text.

4. Register your site with the major search engines - Google, Bing etc - to start the SEO process that will bring you visitors in. Anticipate it taking at least six weeks before they evaluate their site so get in early.

5. Start to build up your content, product descriptions (250 words per item is suggested), pictures, comment etc

6. Register under the various laws and regulations (including, in Britain, the Data Protection Registrar)

7. Revisit the design phase to see what has changed.