Starting your own business: How do you begin?

Small and medium businesses will be the engine of South Africa’s growth. It’s an area of the economy that presents the biggest opportunities for growth and employment in South Africa.

Entrepreneurship is an area worth considering, especially for younger citizens.

Understandably, the thought of becoming an entrepreneur can be intimidating. To start a business, you need more than just a good idea.

You need a product or service to sell or supply, a space and tools to make or provide it, customers to buy or use it, marketing material to spread the word about it, and resources to pay for it all.

The question is: Where do you start?

Identify problems or opportunities that exist within your community

Put together a business plan to help articulate the need your business is trying to address – leveraging templates from sites such as BizConnect platform

Register a company through BizPortal to help you save time, money, and tax certificates. This is critical to help obtain benefits from government facilities and the ability to obtain funding for your business

Open a business account with cheap bank charges such as MyMoBiz account – critical to differentiate between your personal account and business account to avoid using company income for personal use. Ultimately, based on your business account activities you will be eligible to apply for finance to help with expanding your business at a later stage.

Use existing templates from sites such as BizConnect to help with tracking business operations and performance to ensure that as the owner you see where your company is going and be able to potentially see problems that may arise in future.

Critical to choose the right bank to bank with because it also opens your business up to other opportunities that your company can benefit from such as mentorship, advisory, a dedicated support team to help with your business challenges and unlocking potential opportunities to help grow your business. These are some of the benefits that Standard Bank offers.

Create effective product or service awareness to attract customers leveraging social media and establish an online store using SimplyBlu, a solution that is offered by Standard Bank.

‘During these tough economic times it is important for young people to rely on their own skills set and get their own businesses off the ground’ says Naledzani Mosomane, Head of Banking Propositions at Standard Bank.