Aggrey Jonathan K Bett

You can start a business anyhow, but however small the business is, you enhance your chances of success if you follow the following specific steps, including the conception of a business idea/vision, choosing a name and logo, selecting a business format, registering the name, logo and format; performing strategic planning to plan and organize the entity; considering the need for facilities/equipment, systems/processes, management and control structures and elaborate marketing, selling and customer service strategies; writing a business plan; hiring the people you need; obtaining permits and taxation identification numbers; and taking insurance covers, where necessary, sourcing funds and opening shop. In all these activities, strategic planning is essential. Strategic planning is a brainstorming exercise to create a viable product and clever ideas, concepts, methods, models, strategies and actions to develop and run a profitable business. The crucial thing in creating a business is to generate a peerless business idea that is attractive to customers, not you. The business plan is your operating document and a sales pitch should you want to borrow money. Here are the detailed steps:

1. Think of a business idea or opportunity that addresses the needs of known and tested customers. The concept can be a product or a service. An idea is born of a vision to create a new product, service, or anything else to solve a problem, satisfy people's desires, or fill a gap in the market. As you consider turning your idea into a business, you need to start small and test the hypothesis quickly and cheaply to see if it works before spending too much time and money scaling it up. For Testing, you need a minimum viable product (MVP). MVP is a product with core minimum functions to allow early-adopting customers to use and test the product enough to provide feedback. You use the feedback to improve the product before full-scale production and launching. MVP and Testing aim to confirm whether the product is viable. If not feasible, you stop the process, cut costs and move to the next idea. If you fail, you should fail soon and cheaply, not after a lengthy and costly work.
2. Formalize your company if the idea is viable by giving the business a legal format and identity. Choose a name and logo and register the business as a sole proprietorship, partnership, limited liability company or corporation. The form you choose depends on what you want to do. A sole proprietorship is cheaper to register and suitable for a small business, but a significant manufacturing concern requires a limited liability company. If you need to patent the business concept, consider these facets and branding features because patent registration requires a name, logo, and business format. The name should be catchy, easy to write and pronounce, and portray the nature of the business. It should be easy for branding and marketing and as a URL (website domain). It should not be limited in scope, geography and time. You need to register the name, logo, and trademarks and patent the business idea to prevent it from being used by anyone other than you. You register these details with the Registrar of Business Names and Companies or whatever the titles in your country.
3. Do some strategic planning (strategic thinking) to plan and organize the new business. Everything you must do to start and operate a business, including the factors in number (2) above, requires strategic thinking. Organizing and planning are about creative thinking and strategic planning to form a guiding vision and make competitive plans around the key interrelated activities of starting and running a business. The process of organizing and planning involves strategic thinking and planning. So, what is strategic thinking? Strategic thinking is a process through which a person applies the mind to think about, review, and evaluate a situation, factors, facts and information. Out of this process, they develop intelligent methods that, if implemented, can create an alternative future, usually a better future position, for themselves, others or a business. Therefore, strategic planning requires thinking to generate clever ideas for business planning. Strategic planning involves comprehensive and straightforward research, brainstorming, thinking, evaluating, and selecting innovative options and ways of doing things. Strategic planning is, in this sense, an information-gathering exercise that will inform the development of many other plans to start or reform a business. In summary, strategic planning is a brainstorming exercise used to think and create clever ideas, concepts, methods, models, actions and strategies for starting and running a business competitively and profitably. All the elements of starting and operating a business require strategic thinking and planning. At the outset, we must say that strategic planning is not a document. However, the process's output is a document that is the blueprint for creating and operating the business. A formal strategic plan creates and documents a mission, vision, values, goals (objectives), actions, business plans, and budget. The game plan (the blueprint) is a strategic and also business plan. The strategic plan part is vision and strategic-oriented, while the business plan section is action-oriented. 
4. In your strategic planning, you consider the need for elaborate or simple production or delivery facilities; operating facilities (these are equipment, premises, systems, processes, policies, and procedures); marketing, sales, distribution, and customer service strategies; governance structures; policies and procedures; and financial management and recordkeeping tools. It would help if you considered how to keep the business's financial records from the onset because business records should start with the first receipt or payment in the entity. If your business needs resources like an office, furniture, equipment, computer hardware and software and employees, this is where you think about these needs. You can start with the bare minimum and keep adding as the business grows.
5. Having completed strategic thinking, you need to turn the ideas into a plan by preparing and writing a business plan (road map or game plan) and a budget using the information created from strategic thinking. The business plan should capture what you need to do, by whom, when, and the minimum resources necessary to start and run the business. The budget should show the minimum amount of money to commence and operate until the break-even point and the sources of the funds. Sources of funds include your savings, family and friends' savings, bank and credit union loans, credit cards, part sale of equity, etc. It would be best to consider which source is appropriate for your business.     
6. Hire the people you need and have a performance and motivation management scheme to manage their productivity.
7. Obtain licenses, permits, and Taxation/levy identity numbers, and take insurance covers where necessary.
8. Open shop and operate following your business plan (road map), evaluating progress and making changes along the way as necessary. Operating involves executing the business plan daily to create goods, finding customers to sell to, controlling the company's administrative and financial affairs, and continuously developing new ideas and strategies to sustain and grow the business. You operate a business using the people and resources you estimated you would need at the planning stage. People need management, motivation, appraising and rewarding or penalizing to create and maintain productivity.
9. A small business like an apparel boutique does need all these steps to start and operate. However, following these steps on some scale is helpful.