The Ultimate Small Business Startup Checklist: Everything You Need to Launch Successfully

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• Initial Planning and Research
• Legal and Administrative Steps
• Financial Planning and Management
• Setting Up Your Business
• Marketing and Launch 

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Q. What are the essential steps in a small business startup checklist? 

A: The essential steps include choosing a viable business idea, conducting market research, creating a business plan, choosing a business structure, registering your business, obtaining an EIN, opening a business bank account, securing financing, setting up an accounting system, finding a location, buying necessary equipment and supplies, hiring and training employees, creating a marketing plan, building a website and social media profiles, and launching the business. 

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Starting a new business requires a ground-up approach that addresses all the necessary steps, minimizing the risk of unforeseen circumstances that may hinder progress during and after launch.  

Essentially, it requires a strong structure and lots of organization and coordination. In the absence of these elements, constant burnout might become part of your routine.  

So, how do you make sure you don’t miss any of the necessary business startup steps? 

Four words: small business startup checklist! 

You may prefer to call it an entrepreneur checklist.  

However you choose to address it, an ideal startup checklist should provide you with a step-by-step business launch guide that assures a successful launch.  

The checklist should also help you avoid some common startup pitfalls such as funding, financial management, regulatory, legal, hiring, and customer acquisition and retention issues. 

Following the structured approach provided by this small business startup checklist will help you properly attend to the factors influencing these issues.  

In this article, you will familiarize yourself with an ideal startup checklist that covers all the major steps and constituting components, including: 

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• Preliminary planning and research
• Legal and administrative steps
• Funding and financial management strategies
• Setting up your business
• Marketing and launch strategies  

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Let’s dive in! 

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Initial Planning and Research 

Every business starts with an idea and then a plan. However, for a plan to be purposeful, it must be backed by thorough research to extract valuable information that would be essential for business development.  

Therefore, your small business startup checklist must start from the foundation of everything without skipping a step. Don’t jump to creating a business plan when you don’t know what your business is really all about. 

So, first things first, you should: 

Choose a Viable Business Idea 

As an entrepreneur, you likely see business ideas and opportunities in everything. Somewhere in your mind, you also know that some of those ideas and opportunities are not worth the effort.  

It helps to shelf such ideas and focus on those that show promises of viability. Even with those, it’s important to dig even deeper and focus on specific opportunities or problems you think you can solve. 

It also helps to evaluate yourself from the perspective of your target audience, to assume what they may expect of you and how your ideas fit into the picture.  

Putting the final pieces together will let you know if you have a good business idea and check it off your startup checklist.  

The next step is to go out there and find out what your target customer needs and whether the market is fertile for your ideas.  

Conduct Market Research 

If we are to equate starting a new business to playing video games, then conducting marketing research would be an un-skippable cutscene.  

Thorough market research helps you to understand your target audience, competition, and market demand. It typically involves the following: 

• Conducting surveys: This involves running tailored surveys across various channels, including online surveys, focus groups, interviews, and customer observation. Participants must have some degree of interest in your target market, and questions must be structured to extract customer expectations, needs, and market gaps.
• Analyzing industry reports: The competition and the general state of the industry are two key elements to evaluate here. Analyze relevant reports from competitors, industry aggregators, government agencies, and industry experts to determine where your business potentially stands in relation to industry trends, competitors, and even target customers.  

Thorough market research provides you with all the necessary information you need to conclusively validate the viability of your business ideas and finally create an appropriate business plan. 

Create a Business Plan 

Creating a business plan is where most entrepreneur checklists usually start. Although the reasons are understandable, you can tell that missing the previous steps can affect the quality of your business plan.  

Well, now that you have gotten to this part of your small business startup checklist, what makes a good business plan? What are some key components that your business should have?  

The key components include the following: 

• An executive summary: Provide a short but well-detailed overview of your business and business plan. 
• Your business model: Describe the business structure you are adopting and how you aim to manage it.
• Market and competitor analysis: Provide insights on your target customer, market size, business strategies, and barriers to market entry. 
• Marketing strategy: How do you intend to attract and retain customers? What channels and strategies will you use to reach the various segments of your target audience?
• Budgeting, financial plans, and projections: What are the potential expenditures and project profits? How do you intend to fund your business in the long term? 

Other components to cover include the description of your products or services and your business organization and management.  

Your business plan is basically your business launch guide. Put in all the efforts, time, and resources required to ensure it’s as accurate as possible.  

Legal and Administrative Steps 

Erring on legal and regulatory compliance could result in dire consequences. To be on the safe side, you should conduct necessary consultations to determine the legalities that could affect your business and do everything right to conform to them. 

Choose a Business Structure 

Entrepreneurs looking for ways to start a business must acknowledge that they have to incorporate their business in line with any of the various legal business structures available—there is not a lot of room for outliers. 

It’s also important to know the implications of adapting to any of these structures, considering liability, taxation, and compliance.  

The structures include: 

• Sole proprietorship: This is the most common and simplest type of small business structure. Here, your business is unregistered and unincorporated, solely run by you (a single owner), and you pay personal income tax on your business profits. A sole proprietorship doesn’t allow for a clear distinction between the business and the individual. If you are ever in any legal trouble business-wise, it could affect your personal assets and finances—the same could go for your business if you have personal legal troubles.
• Partnership: This is a formal arrangement between two or more parties to run a business and share profits and liabilities equally or limitedly. The business profits are considered as the partners’ income, with each partner paying their own income tax—they are not double taxed.
• Limited Liability Company (LLC): With LLC, the owner(s) is regarded as a “member” of the business, and all their personal assets and finances are protected from lawsuits and creditors if the business is ever in financial or legal trouble. As an LLC business owner, you won’t pay taxes on your profits directly.
• Corporation: This is a legal entity that is very distinct and separate from its owner or owners, which could be a group of individuals, shareholders, or stockholders who come together to run a business for profit. Whether run by an owner or owners, a corporation operates as an entity with ability to (collectively) sue or be sued, enter contracts, own assets, pay taxes, and even offer initial public offering. 

As part of your small business startup checklist, it’s important to consult with a business expert or service provider to understand the fine print of business structures, especially considering that legal implications vary from state to state.  

Services like Inc Authority can help you set up your LLC for free.  

And talking about setting up businesses, how do you register your small business? 

How to Register Your Small Business  

Registering a business involves various processes, and depending on the state, local government, or even the industry, the processes might vary a bit.  

Typically, registering a small business involves: 

• Registering your business name: After you have decided on the appropriate name for your business, you should verify the availability of the name and if there are already-existing trademarks that might pose a conflict. Utilize the search tool on the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website to check for trademarks that might conflict with your business name. If all is right, you can go ahead and legally register your business name and trademark if you feel like it. You can use Trademark Engine to register your trademark at a lower cost.
• Obtaining necessary licenses and permits: The number of permits and licenses you need to operate varies depending on your industry. Do due diligence to determine the necessary documents, the issuing agencies, the required documentation, and the mode of approval.
• Complying with local, state, and federal regulations: There are many moving parts to consider here, and it’s a serious headache to be well into setting up your business only to find out that you’ve missed some. Consult with business experts in your field to get an in-depth understanding of regulations that affect your business. There is no shame in talking to local competitors for guidance.  

Whatever you are doing during your business registration process, you should avoid recreating legal documents by yourself. Consult with an attorney or employ the services of LawDepot to get free legal documents, forms, and contracts or to customize necessary documents with the help of a legal expert.  

Get an EIN 

As part of your small business registration, you must register your business with the IRS to obtain an Employee Identification Number (EIN)—unless you are running a sole proprietorship.  

The EIN is basically your business’s federal tax ID, which is necessary for paying taxes, opening business bank accounts, obtaining business licenses, and hiring employees. 

Your EIN is unique to your business and can be acquired via the IRS website after registering your business with the state and federal government.  

Select your business type, and provide the information required by the prompts on the website to complete and submit your application.  

Financial Planning and Management 

Once you have your licenses, permits, and other legal documents ready, you are ready to open a bank account and get financed.  

It’s time to: 

Open a Business Bank Account 

The need to separate your business finances from your personal finances cannot be overemphasized.  

For starters, the distinction protects your personal assets if you ever have any legal or financial issues. Besides, it also: 

• Makes your budgeting and accounting more efficient 

• Makes it easy to track your company’s cashflow  

• Allows you access to tax deductions, business-only financial services, and some other benefits occasionally reserved for small businesses 

The requirements to open a business bank account might vary slightly depending on the bank, but they mostly require your: 

• EIN, or SSN if you are a sole proprietor 

• Ownership agreements, if any 

• Business license 

• Business formation documents  

With those, opening a business bank account is nearly as easy as opening a personal bank account.  

Secure Financing  

Cars run on gasoline and batteries; businesses run on cash. The question now is: where and how do you get the cash to run your business profitably and in the long term? 

This is the part of your new business checklist where you consider how to finance your business. Some common options include: 

• Personal savings: Using your own cash to fund business expenses.
• Loans: Obtaining loans from financial institutions, friends, family members, or reputable loan agencies.
• Angel investors: Pitching to and securing initial seed funding from private investors who provide financial support to entrepreneurs starting a new business.
• Venture capital: Pitching to and securing private equity financing from venture capitalists, usually in exchange for equity stakes.
• Crowdfunding: Pitching to and raising funds for your business from a large group of netizens or local community members who share in your cause, values, or ideas.  

Some small business tips to bear in mind when seeking funding include deliberating over your options, choosing less risky avenues, and ensuring your pitch is top-notch.  

The better your pitch, the easier it is to secure funds. When preparing your pitch to investors, you should: 

• Provide a background on the motivations and demands fueling your business idea.
• Provide your market research.
• Describe how your products and services blend with the results of your market research.
• Describe your business model and how you intend to keep your business running. Consider revenue streams, profitability, legal compliance, etc.
• Explain your marketing strategy and how you aim to build a loyal customer base.
• Introduce your team members and how their qualifications, experiences, and personalities play key roles in the business’s productivity, efficiency, and sustainability.
• Present your financial projections with appropriate backing.  

It’s always a relief when an entrepreneur finally checks off funding from their business startup steps and checklist. But in the long run, you might find that all the while it was actually the easy part.  

Managing the funds and cash flow effectively and efficiently is where the hard work lies.  

Do you prefer to run your business without major investors? Check out these small business tips for bootstrapping your business by Forbes. 

Set Up an Accounting System  

You need a good, nay great, accounting system to successfully execute your small business launch plans.  

A great accounting system lays bare all your business financial records, empowering your financial management practices with extensive visibility into your daily financial transactions, performance, and cash flow.  

It works even better when you hire a professional to help you crunch the numbers and extract valuable insights that you ordinarily wouldn’t catch.  

As a result, you: 

• Have accurate documentation and data to conveniently manage your payroll, inventory, invoices, etc.
• Greatly minimize financial errors, saving costs and ensuring tax savings and compliance.
• Can create complex and insightful financial reports without breaking a sweat
• Manage your clients, vendors, and suppliers with more ease.
• Can track your expenses and profits and make accurate financial projections  

Some great accounting systems to start with include: 

• QuickBooks: This boasts a comprehensive array of accounting and bookkeeping tools for both small and large businesses. It is compatible with most business operations across industries.
• Vyde: This provides all the functionalities necessary for small businesses to handle their tax, bookkeeping, and accounting needs, helping them stay compliant and organized. 

If you are running complex operations, you should consult with a professional accountant with your industry’s experience to determine how best to approach your business accounting and bookkeeping processes. 

Setting Up Your Business  

Now that you have sorted out the crucial basics, it’s time to hit the ground running. Where do you situate your business? What equipment and supplies do you need to run efficiently? How do you build your dream team? 

Find a Location 

This is the part where a lot of people get stuck in their entrepreneur checklist. Whatever location you pick, you are going to be stuck with it for a while. When walking through this process, it helps to know that your location could greatly affect your business visibility, patronage, and even reputation.  

Here, you should consider the following before choosing a location: 

• Proximity to customers and suppliers: Suppose you are running tour services in the Everglades; it simply doesn’t make sense to locate your office far away from the Everglades. The same applies to every other business. Always aim for locations that are somewhat central to both your customers and suppliers.
• Accessibility: Your office location should be an ideal indicator of inclusion and diversity, being accessible to a broad range of target customers, including those with disabilities. You should also think of accessibility in terms of convenience. Does the location make for an easy commute for your employees? An accessible office location can boost employee satisfaction significantly.
• Cost: Lots of small businesses close their doors in the first five years due to expensive leases that eat into their budgets and profits. Weigh the costs and determine if the move is a financially sustainable one.  

The global business environment has been witnessing a steady rise in remote work adoption since the pandemic.  

Many small businesses are acknowledging that they don’t really need a traditional physical office space to thrive. They could save tens of thousands of dollars annually by renting virtual office space and operating remotely. 

Virtual office space providers like Alliance Virtual Offices make remote work an easy decision for entrepreneurs. They provide meeting rooms and private office access in 1000+ locations across the globe, allowing small businesses to establish instant presence anywhere and be able to have occasional team or client meetings in a professional office setting when needed. 

The best part? You can obtain a virtual office address for as low as $49 per month.  

Buy Necessary Equipment and Supplies  

Now that you have a business location, below is a list of some essential equipment and supplies you may need to check off your entrepreneur checklist, whether running onsite or remote operations: 

• Business cards
• Computers
• Software, including collaboration, communication, accounting, cloud storage, and CRM software.
• Internet
• Telephones, a personal business number, and live call answering 

These are basic supplies required to keep things going in the modern business environment. You might need more supplies depending on your operations.  

With physical offices, you will have to include office furniture, printers, stationery, kitchen supplies, and security systems in your small business startup checklist. 

Be strategic about sourcing and supplier selection. Go for reputable suppliers with excellent customer support and supply chain systems, ensuring that you are always attended to on time.  

Additionally: 

• Plan your purchases in advance to align with your budget.
• Consider market volatility and make budgeting allowances to cover unexpected expenses when making your purchase.
• If you are keen on environmental sustainability, you should consider buying energy-efficient appliances and go for suppliers with sustainability-certified products.
• Review and document the terms of services binding you and your suppliers. 

Hire and Train Employees  

According to the small business outlook statistics created by NerdWallet, about 40% of small business owners are struggling to fill open positions.  

A lot of reasons contribute to this issue, but sometimes, the problem is not having a streamlined hiring process. 

So, here are essential steps to take when hiring: 

1. Identify the positions that need to be filled and define the ideal candidates for them. 
2. Write a job description and advertise/send out the call for applications across relevant channels.
3. Review the applications and select the most suitable candidates for the position. 
4. Give each a call for a quick screening at their convenience. It could be a brief, slightly informal call to weigh their interest. Invite available or truly interested candidates to fill out an assessment test, if you have one. 
5. If not, invite them for an in-person interview—a virtual interview if they are in a different location and meant to operate remotely. 
6. Conduct background and reference checks and make a final decision. 
7. Offer the position to the best-fit candidate. 

While highly experienced talents may not be looking for jobs at a small business, you still want the best people for your team. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t great candidates out there who are enthusiastic about working and growing with small businesses.  

What they need the most from you is training. 

Go for candidates who share your business values and are happy to work with you. Be open to investing in their education and development and establish procedures to ensure that their onboarding is impactful.  

This will lay the foundation for your employees to be properly engaged, have a strong work culture, have high morale and enthusiasm for the job, and be empowered with more skills that boost their performance and productivity.  

More importantly, there will be higher employee satisfaction, which ultimately leads to better employee retention and overall business sustainability.  

Note that employee training is not a one-off thing; invest in your employee’s continuous learning, ensuring that they are attending conferences and relevant training as many times as possible annually. 

Marketing and Launch 

At this point in your entrepreneur checklist, you have your business license, funding, employees, and office space.  

Your small business launch plan is finally coming together—what’s left to do is open your doors to customers. But how do you get them interested? Are you ready to open? 

Well, these next items on your small business startup checklist will help with some answers.  

Create a Marketing Plan 

Recall that your business plan outlines your marketing strategies, detailing how you intend to attract and retain customers from different segments across multiple channels.  

This is the part where you transform those strategies into a solid plan.  

Your marketing plan should have the following key components:  

• Goals and objectives: You should set realistic and measurable goals for your marketing campaign over a given period. How many products should be sold? What’s the expected size of your customer base at the end of the period?
• Target audience: Who’s your ideal customer? Where would one usually find them? What’s their age range, gender, marital status, income level, or location? What are their preferences?
• Branding: What is the image you are trying to portray to your audience? Are you the business that provides the best services at a more affordable rate? Are you the business customers can rely on for truly sustainable products?
• Online presence: Which channels are best positioned to help you achieve your marketing goals? Which channel gets the most investment? Depending on your target audience’s preference, you may consider Google ads, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, as well as an SEO-optimized website. It may also be necessary to consider traditional channels such as radio, television, billboards, and the newspaper.
• Promotional Strategies: Here, all the components listed above are blended into various measures to create strategies that satisfy the requirements of each component. You need multiple strategies because you must create marketing copies and media to suit the customers’ preferences and tastes in different customer segments.  

In all of these, your marketing plans and activities should be founded on insights and input from all departments and catered for with an adequate budget. This will ensure that your marketing and sales operations are streamlined for optimum outcomes. 

Build a Website and Social Media Profiles  

Building on the need to establish an online presence, it’s crucial that you build a user-friendly website and set-up social media profiles with all the right strategies for building online communities across platforms.  

Not only would this step make you more accessible to your target audience, it also opens the lines for seamless two-way communication and opportunities for people to develop common interests around your products and services.  

More so, it creates avenues for you to reap the benefits of community-sourced customer support. 

Below are some tips for creating engaging content and building an online community: 

• Represent and maintain set brand values across all platforms and communication materials.
• Provide quality content without unnecessary embellishments. 
• Use relevant hashtags and buzzwords in your content.
• Create events around your brand, as suitable for given channels. 
• Invite members/followers to share and participate in the events.
• Engage with community members in a timely manner. It might be necessary to have a social media manager as part of your marketing and customer support team.
• Be consistent with your engagements and keep them as safe and family-friendly as possible.
• Solicit and address feedback. 

Checking this off your small business startup checklist creates a welcoming environment that makes potential customers want to know more about your business.  

Launch Your Business 

If you are at this stage, you are probably eager to throw your doors wide open to a throng of customers waiting at your door.  

Before you do so, take a step back, take a deep breath, and crosscheck your entrepreneur resources and your new business checklist to confirm that everything is in order before executing the final step of your small business launch plan.  

• Test your product/service: Consult with your family members, friends, some community members, or a professional to test your products and services to confirm that they efficiently meet the needs for which they were designed.
• Soft launch: Release your products/services in hushed tones to a limited audience, probably at a more affordable price than it would be at a full launch.
• Gather feedback: Solicit feedback from early users to determine what they liked most and perceived drawbacks.
• Make adjustments: Based on the feedback from early users, make necessary modifications to your products and services to solve most, if not all, of the problems they encountered.  

If the complaints are major, it may be necessary to initiate another soft launch after making adjustments.  

If not, you are ready to launch your business! 

Wrapping Up: Small Business Startup Checklist 

Surely, checking off everything in this small business startup checklist means a long ride to launch. It also means doing everything right to ensure that, once launched, your business takes more confident and unwavering steps toward success. 

From research and planning through legal compliance and financial planning to finally setting up your business, there is no step that you would want to miss before launch.  

All the business startup steps are as important as the other, each paving the way for the next to be a more seamless and rewarding journey.

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Further Reading: 

• Technologies Powering Virtual Office Spaces 

• Empowering Independence: A Guide for the Modern Independent Business Owner 

• Maximizing Customer Value: A Guide to Customer Retention Analysis 

• Green Marketing Definition: What It Is and How It Works 

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And for as much as you are all about your business, it’s absolutely necessary to put your customers’ and employees’ needs at the center of every step to ensure employee and customer retention. 

Remember, your location has strong effects on your business visibility, patronage, reputation, and employee satisfaction. 

Alliance Virtual Offices helps businesses like yours get a business address in prestigious business districts and office buildings for as low as $48 per month.  

We also offer more small business and entrepreneur resources and services, such as live receptionists, VoIP 411-listed business phone numbers, and other business services that guarantee you run your business more efficiently and profitably.  

Contact us today for a free consultation to explore how Alliance Virtual Offices services can streamline your business launch and management for a much easier experience.