Everyone always tells you to set goals for your business. That’s an easy thing to say. But actually doing it can be much harder. It’s easy to come up with generic goals like being “successful”. But it’s critically important to develop well thought-out, detailed goals, along with the steps needed to achieve them.

A Grand Vision

There's many different ways to be right here. But one of the things every plan needs is a big vision. What do you want to achieve in the next 10 years? What about the next 3 years? Or in the next 12 months? Under each of those questions begin to map out the steps needed to attain those goals. Starting with a grand vision will help to focus your more short term goals.

Key Performance Indicators

You've probably heard the term key performance indicators. KPIs are the metrics you use to gauge your success. After you select your long, medium and short term goals - decide how to measure whether or not you’ve actually achieved them. It's so great to set these goals, but you need to have some way of actually tracking your progress to make sure that you actually achieve these goals.

Keep track

There are several ways to keep track of your progress. Some people like using spreadsheets. But you can also use calendars or checklists to ensure you’re doing everything possible to achieve your goals.

Picking a name is hard. When you’re starting a new business One of the hardest things simply how you can go about working out what you're going to call yourself. It’s a deceptively difficult task. And one you need to take seriously.

Your name should be memorable and it has to be unique. That said, it isn’t something that you shouldn get hung up on. As long as you're comfortable with the name and it sets you apart - go for it!

Your name choice will really depend on the industry you’re working in. When you start brainstorming for a name make sure you do some searches before you go too attached to a name. There’s a real chance someone is already using it.

Start with a simple Google search to see if the name is in use in your geographical area. You also want to make sure there are no registered trademarks of the name in your country or in a country you might want to operate in someday.

It’s time to set some goals for your business. But why even bother? Today, we’re going to reveal why setting goals is so cricual. Those goals are going to be different depending on what kind of business you’re in. But the most important thing is that you sit down and actually think about it.

If you don't know where you're going…

How are you going to get there? At a point unless you have those goals set you’re not going to get lost along the way. You need to have a steady target to aim at. You can also prioritize tasks and allocate resources better by referring to your goals regularly. So it's very important to have those goals in place, you know exactly where you're going to go, and hopefully, how you're going to get there.

Making better decisions…

So when you set a goal, it needs to be something in your business or in life that you can actually achieve. Or at least you can stretch yourself to try and achieve. There are so many bright, shiny objects to chase. But there's so much that you can do. There's so many opportunities that that that pop up for you on a daily basis. And you need to be able to filter out whether or not you should chase those things.

Whatever decision you've got to make, you've got to filter them through your goal. And if you don't have goals, then how do you know what decisions to make? All of your goals need to be centered around where you're going. And they need to be in furtherance of the goal.

Today, we want to talk about the key members of your initial team. This is not your initial employee team. Instead, this is your team of consultants that everyone should have. Especially during your start-up phase. You need to get great advice from your consultants to make sure that everyone's on the same page going forward

Accountant

The first one is the accountant. Wherever you are, you're going to have to play some pay some sort of tax. An accountant will help to organize your structure in the best way so that you pay the minimal tax.

Lawyer

You need a great lawyer right from the start. The lawyer will look at the structure you’ve chosen for your business and give their input. You want that lawyer involved at the beginning so you can build up that relationship over the term of your business. Leasing, employment agreements and IP are all going to need to be looked over by your legal team.

Bookkeeper

Your bookkeeper is different from an accountant. This is the person that actually enters all of your receipts and payments. At the end of the day, you've got to report all that properly. And you got to know where your money's coming in and where its going. So getting a bookkeeper early on is a really crucial member of your initial team.

It’s time to get your procedures and processes in place! It does take time to put these sorts of things together. But we consider them to be a vitally important for your business. And it's a good idea to get them done right at the start. One big part of this process is bringing on new clients and staff.

Building a process

Before you bring on a new client you have to ask some questions. How do you engage with them? Do you get money upfront? Having a client onboarding process is really important to make sure that you get paid in a timely fashion. It's somewhere between six to nine times cheaper to get repeat work from an existing client that didn't get a new client. So having these types of policies and procedures in place is really important.

Bringing on new staff

The whole idea is to have a consistent approach for all your new hires. You need to make sure that everyone is on the same page. There's also all the tax and other documents that need to fill ou. But the most important part of the onboarding is that they've given all the information they need in an accessible format.

Harassment policy

If you've got a team, a team of any size, you need to deal with harassment because it's something that comes up more and more often. You need to have policies and procedures that actually govern these things. These are going to be evolving documents and you should get things like harassment policies drafted by lawyers or consultants who know what they're talking about. It's not a one size fits all exercise!

We're talking about intellectual property today which is a pretty big topic in any business. But specifically, what we want to talk about today is the concept of having a separate legal entity for your IP. When is that a good idea?

Your business can be structured any number of ways. You could be a sole trader or be a company. The problem with those entities owning intellectual property is that if you get sued

or go bankrupt then any intellectual property that you own could be lost.

One way to protect that IP is to have a different entity to control it. That separate entity doesn't do anything else. It just owns the intellectual property.

The ideal situation would be to create that structure during the startup type phase of your business. If you do it later, it's going to be more expensive and will be more complicated. Once the separate structure is created you can then license the IP to your business.

The trading entity then enters into agreements with suppliers, employees etc. But if you can’t do it at the beginning, it's never too late. You should think about doing it particularly if you've got some valuable IP.

Today we're talking about processes. The processes you’ve developed are a huge part of your value. Here are three ways you can document your processes. This is part of Phase Five of the Business Legal Lifecycle. Phase 5 is all about protecting intellectual property. There are few things about your IP more important that a carefully documented process.

Video

Everyone has a video camera in their pocket these days. It’s really easy to simply record yourself performing your daily routine. If you do most of your work on a computer capture your screen with Windows built-in recorder or use an app like Zoom.

Checklists

This is probably the most formal way of documenting a process. It serves two purposes. The first is to ensure the consistency of how that particular thing is to be done. The second is to ensure important steps are not missed.

Flowchart sharing

Flowcharts are a bit like a checklist. But they add a visual flair that can be much easier for some people to follow. There are several programs available to create a flowchart inlcuding LucidChart and SmartDraw

We're talking about trademarks. They are an incredibly part of your business. Here are the five things you need to consider before having your trademark registered.

Have a unique name

You have to make sure the name of your business is really unique. Todo that that you have to do multiple searches to ensure someone else hasn’t already claimed that name. If your name is unique and it has value, trademark it!

Protect the brand

You’ve spent a lot of money developing your brand. You have to protect it! This becomes especially important when you’re getting ready to sell the business. A trademarked brand seriously increases your value!

Getting ready for a franchise

When you sell a franchise to someone else, you're selling your brand and your system. And your brand really is your registered trademark. And when people are buying franchises, think of McDonald's and KFC, they're buying the brand. We've had cases in the past where people have decided to franchise but haven’t been able to register their trademark. It cost them a lot of money!

Getting ready for a sale

If you're wanting to exit is by selling to another company company. So in any sale, the prospective purchaser is going to be looking into how you operate. One of the first things they will look for is whether or not there's a registered trademark.

No copying!

There are a lot of brands out there and copying them is pretty easy. Some people just have no filter and no ability to actually stop themselves from stealing other people's good ideas,

Today's show is about trusts. A trust is another way to structure your business that has some unique benefits. Here are the 5 things you need to know about trusts.

Separate entity

A trust is a separate legal entity. That means that the people involved in the trust can’t be sued for the debt the trust incurs. So the separation is very important from a legal point of view, because it just separates out that liability and protects the people involved in the trust. So that's number one. Number two beneficiaries.

Beneficiaries

Who is going to benefit from this trust? That decisions will have big ramifications for how the business operates. The beneficiary can be a person or a company. Or it could even be members of your family.

Power of appointment

This is someone in the trust will have the power to appoint and remove the trustee. That’s a lot of power. Never choose someone for this role that you don’t trust implicitly.

Trustee

The trustee will manage the day-to-day affairs of the trust.

Tax Benefits

In Australia, there are great tax benefits to having a trust. You can distribute income, you can move things around and really get the best tax position for you and your family.

Today we want to talk about things you need to look out for when you're starting a new business. It’s an incredibly exciting time but you have to make sure everything is in order.

What structure will you use?

You could be as a sole trader, or form a company or a trust. If you don't make a clear choice that's when you’ll fall into into problems. You really need to think about what your goal is, and then get advice from your lawyer or your accountant before making this decision.

Who is your ideal client?

So when you first start out it's very easy to sell to absolutely everything to everyone. Unfortunately, in most businesses, that's not the way to have a long term success. You need to think about who your ideal client is. Create a client avatar that describes your perfect sale. Describe their job, income, family, car and hobbies. If you're trying to market to everyone, you're marketing to no one.

Insurance

There's a variety of different insurances that are out there, depending on your industry. Make sure you have a price it's a professional indemnity insurance. You may need some insurance for the properties that you're going to operate in. You also want to consider your personal insurances as well as income protection insurance.

Lease

If you’re going to lease a property you really need to make sure that you get the right advice on that lease. A bad lease can sink your business so make sure you get plenty of advice from your lawyer, real estate agent and accountant.