Starting Your Business

Get ready for planning, financing and launching (or re-launching) your business.

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Barbara Corcoran is the Founder of Corcoran Group and the Chairman of Barbara Corcoran, Inc. Her credentials include straight D’s in high school and college and twenty jobs by the time she turned twenty-three. Over the next twenty-five years, she’d parlay a $1,000 loan from her boyfriend into a five-billion-dollar real estate business and one of the largest and best-known brands in the business.

Barbara is the real estate contributor for NBC’s TODAY Show where she comments weekly on trends in the real estate market, and is an investor/shark on ABC’s reality hit "Shark Tank".

As a speaker, Ms. Corcoran brings her frontline experience and infectious energy to each person in the audience. Motivational, inspirational, and sometimes outrageous, her tell-it-like-it-is attitude is a refreshing approach to success.   

Initially, you should invest as much of your personal resources into your business as possible. At the minimum, it ensures that you remain in control of the vision and direction of your idea as opposed to investors that will come onboard. Additionally, your business typically can’t borrow money unless you’ve shown your confidence in the project by personally investing at least 20 to 30 percent of your own funds. You need to use your money to attract more money. Not putting any skin in the game, will likely not encourage anyone else to.

Sales that don’t get tracked, don’t exist. And, customers with no contact and demographic information captured are imaginary. To be successful in your venture, you must start out tracking the numbers upfront so that you can prove to yourself that the business is viable and also make a strong case to potential investors down the road that your idea is worthy of the risk. Start out by tracking sales over different time periods. What are your annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily sales? The next metric to assess is your sales by product or service, so you can quantify exactly what’s selling and get rid of what’s not. Last, consider revenue per sale. What is the actual net profit for each individual unit per sale? Also, get in the habit of capturing as much data on your customers as possible. Saying you serve women is not enough. How old is the average woman you serve? Is she married or single? Does she have children? Where does she like to eat, shop or volunteer? The more intel you gather on your customers, the more you can prove that you understand their needs and equip yourself with the products and services to meet their demand.

Creating a working business plan is often a vital first step when searching for financing options. More than just drafting up a document, you need to create a working plan that can you can revisit and reevaluate, so that it evolves to mirror the business you want to create. The business plan should contain a forecast for your business with at least two scenarios: (1) how you expect your business to perform if you don't get any financing, and (2) how it will perform if you do. There are a lot of resources you can turn to for help on the plan, such as small-business resource centers at local universities, your community, or asking for help from trusted professionals or other small business owners.

The Small Business Administration provides great templates for creating your working business plan. Check out sba.gov/writing-business-plan.

It's important to keep accurate and clear financial statements, bank statements and even tax returns! These types of documents are the things that can make or break potential business loans. It might make sense to engage an accountant or trusted financial advisor for help. Providing this type of documentation gives the potential financing entity a glimpse into your future cash flow to pay creditors, employees and, most importantly, them! If you plan on applying for funding within the next 24 months, you'll want to prove you can make the most money possible.