You Don’t Need a Business Plan to Start an Online Business

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So, I've got an idea for an online business, but how do you actually start it from scratch? I'm going to give you a step by step breakdown of what I would do if I was starting an online business from scratch. Now, one of the things that I always recommend to all of my clients, you'll see it throughout all of my content, particularly here on this podcast.

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The Freedom Method is that I highly, highly recommend that when you start an online business, particularly if it's your first ever business that you are working on, do something that already works for you. I mean by that is use an existing skill, an existing passion, some existing experiences to build your online business because it is going to make building from scratch and taking an idea from scratch and turning into something that you can launch ten times easier than if you had no baseline or no foundation.

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If you're taking an idea that you've got and you're using the existing skills, the existing things that you enjoy doing and the existing experiences that you have, and building something out of those that is going to make your life so much simpler. And why would we overcomplicate business if it doesn't need to be that complicated to start thinking about all of the things that you're actually really good at, all of the things that you love doing, all of the experiences that you already have over however many years you've been in the work place over your education experiences, wherever a situation you're coming out of.

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What can you take from those experiences and bring into your very own online business? Because that is going to give you a really good, solid baseline of how to bring a business to life. One thing I've noticed over the past six years of helping people start online businesses is that they don't usually have a problem with coming up with loads of ideas.

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They normally have ideas, but actually getting the conversation like, what are the first steps to take when it comes to building online business? That's why they struggle. They have this amazing idea, but they don't really know how to bring together their skills, their experiences, and use them to build that online business from scratch. So let's talk about how you're going to do it.

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Once you've identified those skills, I want you to match those skills up with a part of the business that would be running. So let me give you an example. Let's say you're really creative. If you love R, you love drawing and you've got a real great eye for design. You might be really great at creating all of the marketing content and getting all of your visual ideas down onto paper so that you can market your business.

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And that skill could also be used in your business as part of your business. Maybe you are offering graphic design services to clients, or maybe you're creating digital products for people who don't have those same design skills. Or maybe you're prompting AI to do the design work for you and you are the creative director behind that. I work whatever it is.

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You have all of these amazing skills within design. You have an eye for design. You probably have an eye for attention to detail. That is absolutely something that you should be utilizing in your online business, because it's something that culturally comes naturally to you. It's something you've probably already got experience. And so it'd be such a wasted skill if you didn't bring that into your online business.

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So write a list of all of those skills that you could transfer over, and write a list of all the things that you love doing as well, because we want to incorporate as many of the things that you love doing in your online business to make it a really enjoyable process for you. Because if you're working on something that you're not very good at, you're working on something that you're you don't really have much passion for, or you're working in something that you have absolutely no experience in, and that is going to be really hard.

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And online business is hard enough as it is. We don't need to make your life harder. So the first step, when you've got this idea for starting an online business from scratch, figure out all the things that you're good at and the skills that you can transfer over. Now, like I said, that could even form the baseline of your business and you could build a business around those skills, or they could just be things that you utilize in your online business.

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The second step is now figuring out what you're going to sell, because obviously if we don't have anything to sell, we actually don't have business. Now, one mistake that I see so many on my business team does make is trying to take on all of the ideas that they have at once, and really overcomplicate their life. Now, the problem with that is when you try and do 100 different things, you actually do nothing.

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Okay. Let's say you are a service business provider in the wellbeing space, and you're trying to market yourself and make yourself known for like six different things. Maybe you're a writing practitioner, maybe you're a somatic healer, maybe your channeler, maybe your therapist. Maybe you do yoga. Maybe you do voice activations. Those six things are all very different customers.

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There's probably a small amount of people that are going to want all of those six things. But if you want to try and be known for all of those six things, you're actually being known for zero, because I'm like, what on earth does this person do? So what I would really recommend is to hone in on one thing that, you know, you are really, really flipping good at, and then you can have supporting offers based around that.

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So if I was building out your office suite right now, what I'm looking at is your core offer. Now, your core offer is the thing that you want to be known for. That core offer could be your very core service. The thing that you want the most people to buy into. It can be whatever price point you want to be at.

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But the thing that is going to drive the most of your revenue, then I would be looking at something that people can add on to that core offer. So what's the next layer to that core offer? Can they upgrade so that you have something else to sell? If someone buys into that and then after they finish working with you on that, you can then be like, hey, I've also got this thing you'd be really interested in.

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Would you like some more information about that? And then you can upsell that person. And then I would also look at what you can do as a down sell because that down. So it's going to be really important to capture the people that maybe can't afford or aren't ready for your core offer. But make sure you are looking at your core offer again, integrating those skills, those experiences, those passions, because you don't want to be delivering an offer that you don't love to deliver.

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You don't want to be selling something that you don't believe and that you're not passionate about, that you've got no experience. And because people feel that if you are trying to sell something with a lack of energy and you're like, oh, this isn't actually something that I'm particularly interested in, but I've created this thing now, and now I need people to buy it.

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People can feel that energy, even if it is from behind a screen. So if you can make that thing something that you've already got experience and that you're already passionate about, that it's already a key skillset of yours that is going to really help your business thrive. And the energy will come across to your ideal customer. And that brings me on to the third point.

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Is looking at your ideal customer. Who do you want to buy this thing? Who needs your skills, your passions, your experiences in their own business? Because we're talking maybe about a B2B business or in their own personal life. If we're talking about B2C, how are you offering their services and who are you offering them to? Because if you don't understand who is the person that you want to buy this thing from you, it's going to be very, very challenging for you to target them with marketing to speak to them directly and get them to actually convert with you.

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While we are going to build together, you offer. We're going to look at how you can bring in all of your ideas, your skills, and your experiences into your existing business. And then we're going to figure out exactly who you're targeting so you know who you're selling to. I will be doing this live with you, a live demonstration of what it looks like to build this out for yourself, so you can then go take it away and repeat that for yourself and build your very own online business.

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You can literally follow my action plan step by step. And then I'm going to give you your next steps in that live session to actually start bringing your business to life. You're essentially going to live with your offer, mapped out the ideal target customer profile figured out, and what exactly business you're going to be starting. And then I'm going to give you a three day action plan to start it.

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Imagine by the middle of June, you could have actually started working on your dream freedom online business. Not going to launch a business in that three days. Obviously, that would be quite impossible, but it is a really great starting point. So I'm going to pop the link in the show notes if you want to come and join me there.

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Even if you can't make the session live or you're listening to this after the 2nd of June, go and check it out because there will be a playback sent out straight after the session. Now, a common misconception that I really want to address is that you need a business plan to start an online business. That's not true. We don't need a business plan.

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Do we need a plan? Yes. Do we need a little bit of strategy behind it? Probably yes. Otherwise, we're going to be throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. And that's not a bad way to start a business. In fact, you can learn a lot from those experiences, but it means you've got to go round the houses to get to where you want to be.

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Now, if you want to get somewhere really fast, really quickly but properly with solid foundations behind you, that's what I'm teaching in my Free Business bootcamp, because I want you to build a business with really solid foundations. We're not going to build you a full business plan. We don't need a 50 page document telling you exactly what you're going to be doing to start this business, because quite frankly, when you get started on your business, things are going to change along the way.

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And that's perfectly okay. That is perfectly normal. I think something that people get really scared of when they're starting a business is this fear that like the thing that they are envisioning in their mind isn't actually going to be what the thing is that they're going to be selling? And to be honest, that's true. It probably isn't. Your idea, as it stands today, is probably not the idea that you're going to learn to make money with.

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And that's fine. That is really, really normal. But instead of building yourself a full business plan, all we need to do is to find those three things. What skills you're going to be bringing into your business, what offer you're going to be bringing out into the world, and who exactly are you targeting with your offer? Then we can take everything from there.

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I'm going to give you your very next steps to start this online business from scratch, with whatever idea you have, even if you don't have an idea, we can help you come up with an idea in the Freedom Business Boot Camp on the 2nd of June. The link is in the show notes and I can't wait to see you there!

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