Up and Running:

This is the third of three parts. The first part appeared here a month ago, and the second here two weeks ago. All three were published first on Entrepreneur.com and are based on the book 3 Weeks to Startup, which I co-authored with Sabrina Parsons. That book, published by Entrepreneur Press, came out in the autumn of 2008. It’s built on the idea that most how-to-start books fall back on the older, pre-web ways to get things done; and that today, because of the tools available, three weeks is still credible.

Day 15: Think about your location.

Most people know they’re either going to work out of their home or they know where their office will be. They’re considering the right location, how it should look, where it should be, what else is nearby and so on.

Even if it’s a home office, you’ve probably been thinking about it. Now’s the time to make sure you’re set up. Desk, computer, telephone, internet, quiet if you need it, view or not, the whole nine yards.

For a retail shop, workshop or office space, if you haven’t done so already, start looking. It’s almost time to make a decision.

There are brokers to help, and they won’t charge you because they get their commission from the landlords (which you should keep in mind as you deal with them because it’s always good to remember who’s paying). Find a broker who’ll work with you; one who listens to you about what you want and don’t want.

Today take steps to establish the location, whether it’s simply adding desks and phones in your home office or making calls to revamp a restaurant or manufacturing plant. For some people and businesses, this takes more than three weeks. Sometimes you can’t even lock in the location you want in that time. But start planning the office space in which you want to work, as this can create the most lag time.

Day 16: Set up your accounts.

With some good accounting software, you can keep track of every transaction–every check, each invoice you receive and those you send out. Keep careful track of spending and invoice categories, and before you know it, you’re doing the bookkeeping. The best way to choose your new accounting software is to check with your bank so your system and theirs will be compatible. That will save you endless frustration with inputting records.

Day 17: Create the legal documents.

Way back in Week 1, you got together with the others involved and wrote down your agreements on who is supposed to own how much of the business, who does what and who is putting in how much money. And you started looking at possible names for the business. Today, get it locked in by creating the legal entity online, talking to an attorney, or both.

Do yourself a favor, though, before you start the attorney’s meter running: Make sure you understand the basic tradeoffs, so you can spend the billable attorney time making the right choices, rather than just understanding the options. We don’t recommend setting up your business without an attorney (online or not), but if you get informed first, you’ll reduce the expense.

Day 18: Start hiring.
You’re nearing the end of your three-week startup. Just three days left, so if you’re going to have employees, it’s time to hire them or at least begin hiring. You started the recruiting process last week, so you should have some people in mind.

Don’t do job interviews without first going over a simple review of what you can and can’t say. A lot of what would at first glance seem like common sense is technically illegal. For example, you’re not supposed to ask someone his or her age or marital status because that information can lead to the appearance or suspicion of discrimination.

Day 19: Get funding.

This is another one that depends on the details. It can be as easy as deciding to spend a few thousand dollars you already have or as hard as raising millions of dollars from professional investors.

Your simple startup, involving a home office and a computer, might need nothing more than what you can get at Office Depot in an afternoon.

If you have to raise more money than you have, you need to write a detailed business plan, find potential investors and do a lot more work. If you’re looking for professional investment, you almost certainly won’t get that in three weeks (although there are some rare exceptions). You can still get your business going with the money you can get quickly. That way you look much more attractive to investors.

Day 20: Think about opening day.

This should be fun: Imagine the big party, the searchlights beaming into the sky, a brass band. Well, maybe not all that, but opening day is a good event to start your business marketing right.

Plan your opening day, and make sure everyone knows about it. This is the chance to write a press release, talk to local or trade reporters and generally let people know about your business. You want to build buzz so that when you open, people are aware of you.

Day 21: Start your business.

You’re up and running, and in three weeks, just as we had hoped. That makes today the first day of the rest of your business.

Today you’ll want to take another day to make the sale.

Focus today and see how many customers you can get in the door, figuratively or literally, depending on your business.

On your first day, remember to observe what’s going right, what’s going wrong and to note what could be better.

Your business will quickly become different from what you expected, and that’s OK. The key is to record what’s different and why, and make course corrections. In the real world, your planning should become management. So review your plan vs. actual frequently, and run your business better.

This is the second of three parts. The first part appeared here a month ago. All three were published first on Entrepreneur.com, and are based on the book 3 Weeks to Startup, which I co-authored along with Sabrina Parsons.  That book, published by Entrepreneur Press, came out in the autumn of 2008. It’s built on the idea that most how-to-start books fall back on the older, pre-Web ways to get things done; and that today, because of the tools available, 3 weeks is still credible.

Day 8: Plan your marketing strategy.

Think about your target market. Imagine a hypothetical, ideal customer. Determine his or her age, gender, job, favorite media and family situation. It’s important to know your customer well.

What’s your message? Can you say it in a single sentence? What if you have just one sentence that your customers will listen to? Where would you send that message? How would you reach them?

Think about your marketing strategy and implementation details. Take the time to go through a short but focused marketing plan to make sure you understand what it will take to market your business.

Day 9: Develop your look and feel.

Start developing a sense of the look and feel of your company as your buyers will see it. What will your logo look like? What sense will it convey? Old-fashioned? Trustworthy? Leading edge? Everybody has a brand. What will yours be? How will you get that idea across to customers and potential customers?

Develop your look and feel through logos, signs, letterhead and graphic standards. These are your branding essentials, and you need to have them in place before you get much further.

Day 10: Start building your website.

Have you started your website already? Have you been thinking about it? Today’s the day to get going with that.

If you’re building a Web 2.0 application or any website that’s core to your business, then you might have to settle for simply having begun by the end of the three weeks.

For most businesses, you can have a website built very quickly. Think about the basic elements of your website, and at least get a site up with basic information about you, your business, your products, and your services.

These days there are some good shortcuts available: take a look at TypePad, WordPress, and blogger platforms, for example. These were built for blogging but can apply to many small sites, with little to no  formatting work.

Day 11: Think about how you’re going to get paid.

Think about how your customers will pay you. If you’re going to be selling to consumers, then you probably want to establish a merchant account so you can accept credit cards.

These days, because of the online vendors, there are a lot more options. In the old days you had to go straight to your favorite local bank, which had a detailed and time-consuming process. These days, you have the option of setting yourself up with some Web stores (like Amazon, Yahoo!, and others) that can handle that part of it for you.

If you’re selling to businesses, then think about invoices and credit policies for business customers. There’s no underestimating how important getting paid is.

Day 12: Try making a sale.

Have you been able to make a sale yet? Maybe you should take today to peddle your goods. Even though you’re not fully established yet, lots of businesses (maybe most of them) start selling before they’re fully launched.

This is where you get to make sure that people want to buy what you’re selling.

Even if you can’t make a sale, because things are ready, talk somebody through it. The selling will continue for as long as your business is open, but we wanted to include it here as well because so many businesses are born at the moment the first customer says “yes.”

Day 13: Get an insurance policy.

Time to talk to an insurance broker, and get your business insurance started. These days, you can do a lot of research or even do the whole thing online. And if not, remember the old-fashioned telephone tree-style of finding the right people. Talk to any insurance broker you can think of, ask some questions, and if he or she isn’t the right one, ask who else you should talk to. Find the right person by asking the wrong person who else you should talk to.

In the doing, you’ll find out what kinds of insurance are appropriate for the type of business you’re starting.

Day 14: Build your dream team.

Have you been thinking about how to build your team? Do you know the people you want to bring on? It’s time to start ironing down the team and the employees, and start the recruiting process. Depending on your specifics, you’ll likely need job descriptions, and you’ll need to place ads on the right websites.

Start thinking about your employee list. Who will you need to help you out when you actually open for business? Will it be just you and your business partner? Do you need to hire service people? Drivers? Designers?

To get started, take another look at the financial planning you did in Week 1. See who you can afford to hire and start looking.

I accepted a challenge the other day: five steps to startup. Here are my answers:

1. Look in the mirror.
Get comfortable with who you are, what you know, where you’ve been, what you like to do and what you do well. That’s one of you if you’re a one-person startup, and the group of you if you’re a team. Starting a business is like marrying somebody; you hope to be together for a long time, and you’d better be compatible. Strategy is sometimes as simple as the famous SWOT–strengths, weaknesses, opportunities  and threats. Capitalize on strengths, work away from the weaknesses, position yourself to take advantage of opportunities and avoid threats. What matters isn’t the type of business but rather its match with your reality.

2. Jump into your customer’s skin.
Jump inside your customer’s (or client’s or buyer’s) head and look through those eyes out at the world and the business you propose to start. Make sure you understand, from the customer’s view, what you’re selling, why people want it, what benefits they get and what makes them spend their money with you. Don’t kid yourself: Build a better mousetrap and the world will only make a path to your door if the world has a lot of mice, doesn’t like them, knows you’re there and cares how much better your mousetrap is. Way too many people think they can do something they like and sell it. But the buyers, not you, get to decide whether they want to buy it. What if nobody wants a wagon-wheel coffee table? You should be either sure there’s a “there” there, or do some market research; and be honest with yourself–if you’re not absolutely sure, do yourself a favor and make sure.

3. Plan.
Don’t shudder; I don’t necessarily mean a full, formal business plan, although I am in favor of that if you can do it. But even if you don’t need a full formal plan, give yourself a break: Do some planning–abbreviated or not–to help you think through the larger goals, steps and details. In my new book (info at http://planasyougo.com), I’m recommend that people get started quickly, using just the pieces they need. Don’t delay startup to complete a formal plan but definitely take the time to reduce uncertainty by developing that core strategy as the heart of the plan and then the key steps–dates, deadlines, budgets, tasks, responsibilities–as the flesh and bones of the plan. Add some basic numbers, a sales forecast, expense budget and startup costs, and you have most of a plan done. And don’t wait until it’s all done; get started anywhere you like, and get going.

4. Gather a team.
One of the mistakes I made along the way was trying to do too much alone. Even if you’re the lone ranger, don’t try to do all the legal, all the bookkeeping, all the administration, all the selling, all the marketing and . . . whew, I need to take a breath. Way too many people fail because they don’t recognize that nobody’s really good at everything. They play too close and too tight. Get help. Make sure you have an attorney you trust and an accountant you trust, at the very least. This is the real world; it takes a village to build a business.

5. Get the word out.
Target marketing is critical. Bear down on the key target customer, and figure out what that person will say about you, think about you, do about you. Everything comes at you all at once, so you have to stay focused on the important things. Don’t confuse urgent with important; make sure the important things get done. Think of the principle of displacement: Everything you do rules out something else you don’t do. Great exercise: Figure out who isn’t in your market. Carve your market into your mind as if you were carving a wood figure from a stick, removing pieces of it, one at a time.

Three weeks? Sure, why not? I know very well one business that started in a single day. Here’s that story, from my Planning Startups Stories blog. It’s about Palo Alto Software, which now has more than 40 employees, more than 70 percent market share in the U.S. retail market, a subsidiary in the UK and a new management team.

I also posted about this three weeks idea last April in “Can You Really Start a Business in Three Weeks?,” also in Planning Startups Stories. I said it depends a lot on the business: how big, how technical, how much financing it needs, how many people are involved, etc.

Today, as I focus in on the final edited version of our new book 3 Weeks to Startup, I’d like to look at this again. Our editors have asked us to go back and build the timeline, realistically, to prove the point that you can do this. I think we can do that easily.

Here’s what we suggest as the stuff of week one.

So that, for most businesses at least, is what I’d suggest for week one of the three weeks to startup. You may notice that I’m skipping over some of the market research that many people would say is vital. I’m saying, in contrast, that if you already know your market and what you’re going to offer, and why and to whom, then you’re like a lot of other entrepreneurs. You’re not going to do a big market research project. So let that one go unless you need it. And as I suggest in the table, if you need it, you already know who you are.

So this is week one of the three weeks to startup. Week two of three comes in my next post.