How to Start a Small Business

What the first ninety days really look like

Forget the pitch deck version of starting a business. The real first ninety days for a self-funded small business look something like this. Two weeks of thinking and talking to people. Two weeks of setting up the boring essentials. Two weeks of building the smallest possible thing you can show a customer - a one-page website, a sample, a price list, a booking link. Then six weeks of trying to find ten people who will actually pay you for it.

If that sounds underwhelming, that's the point. The owners who do well tend to be the ones who treat the first ninety days as a structured search for evidence, not a launch event. They're not trying to build a business that scales. They're trying to find out whether the thing they want to sell is something a real person will hand over money for, twice, without being talked into it.

If you're starting around an existing job, the timeline stretches. Six months to ninety calendar days isn't unusual. The work is still the same shape. Just the cadence changes.

The four questions

Before you do anything else - before you register a company, order business cards, design a logo, build a website or open a social media account - work through these four questions on a single page. Honest answers, in plain words.

Question one: who is this for?

Not "anyone who needs my service." Not "small businesses" or "busy parents" or "people who like good coffee." A specific shape of customer you can picture. A landlord with three to ten rental properties. A first-time buyer renovating a Victorian terrace. A bookkeeper at a six-person firm. An over-fifties walker recovering from a knee operation. The clearer the picture, the easier every later decision becomes.

If you can't answer this question yet, that's useful information. It usually means the idea was shaped around what you wanted to do, not who you wanted to serve. Both ends matter, but starting with the customer makes the rest of the work much easier.

Question two: what problem are you actually solving?

Customers don't buy services. They buy outcomes. A bookkeeper isn't selling spreadsheets, they're selling the relief of not getting a tax bill they didn't expect. A personal trainer isn't selling forty-five minutes in a gym, they're selling the confidence of getting dressed without thinking about it. A plumber isn't selling pipework, they're selling a working bathroom by tomorrow morning.

The honest test: can you describe, in one sentence, what's different about your customer's life or business after they've bought from you? If the answer is vague, the message will be vague, the price will be soft and the customer will negotiate.

Question three: how will they hear about you?

Most new owners have a clear answer to questions one and two and a hopeful answer to question three. "Word of mouth." "Social media." "Through my network." Those are wishes, not channels. A real answer names a specific way a stranger would discover you exist this month, with no help from your friends.

Useful examples: "They'll search for a local plumber on Google and see my Google Business Profile." "They'll ask in a local Facebook group and see two regulars recommend me." "They'll see my stall at the Saturday market and pick up a card." "They'll get a referral from one of three letting agents I've already met." Each one is testable. Each one tells you exactly what to work on first.

Question four: what would the first ten sales actually look like?

Picture them in your head. Where are these ten people right now? What are they doing this week that makes them ready to look for you? What would they type into Google? What would they ask a friend? What would they hand over - cash, a card, a bank transfer, a deposit? How much, on average, would each sale be worth? How long would each sale take to deliver?

If you can describe ten realistic first sales in concrete detail, you have something close to a business. If the picture is fuzzy, the rest of the eBook is mainly about turning it into a clear one.

Why this beats a business plan

There's nothing wrong with a business plan. Some owners need one to get a loan, a grant or a commercial lease. The trouble is that most first-year business plans are written to be impressive to a reader the writer hasn't actually met. They're full of confident assertions that haven't been tested. The four questions above are deliberately small because they're meant to be tested in real life, not defended in a meeting.

If your bank or landlord asks for a plan, write one. But write the four-question page first, then dress it up. The page is what runs the business. The plan is paperwork.

A recurring principle: start with the customer

If there's one principle that earns its place at the front of this series, it's that decision-making is much easier when you start with the customer. Every later choice - what to charge, where to advertise, how the website should look, what to say in the first phone call - falls out of a clear picture of who you're serving and what they're trying to achieve. Most expensive mistakes in year one are versions of the same thing: a decision made without a clear customer in mind.

We'll come back to this principle in almost every chapter. The companion eBook Small Business Ideas and Opportunities goes deeper into the customer side of choosing what to build. The eBook after that, Market Research for Small Businesses, gives you cheap ways to back up the picture in your head with real-world signals.

What to do this week

Open a single page. Write the four questions across the top. Spend an hour drafting a first answer to each one in plain language. Then go and have one twenty-minute conversation with someone who looks like the customer you described. Don't sell. Just listen. Come back to the page and rewrite anything that didn't survive the conversation.

In the next chapter we'll take whatever shape your idea is in and run it through a simple filter to check whether it's worth the year of your life it's about to ask for.