Home featured Advice Editor's Choice Featured Advice Going out on your own? The essential checklist for start-ups trying to enter the market Guest Author June 1, 2015 Starting your own business is a time of both excitement and anxiety. Everyone knows about the difficulties and the risk of failure, but you have decided to take the plunge anyway. Great. I wish you every success. But here are five things that are essential to your ability to succeed. Focus on finding customers first, then turn it into a system. The biggest mistake new business owners make is to invest a lot of money into marketing collateral and websites and even products and programs, before they ever know if they can find a customer. Until you know you have a product or service people will pay for, all this could be wasted. Another mistake is the flip side; starting a business based on a contract with one customer. If you don’t find more customers, you don’t have a business. You simply have a new job with less security than the job you just left. For start-ups, finding a way to generate leads that become customers is the biggest key to success. The majority of your efforts first should be invested into finding a predictable and scalable method of attracting and converting customers. Once you can do that, and systematise it, you have a business that can succeed. Many businesses never achieve this and are always struggling to find enough customers to get