Skills to Start a Business

You’ve got an idea for a business and now you’re ready to take the plunge into making your dream become a reality but don’t know where to start. Fret not, as we will be sharing tips and guidance on how to gain the knowledge and support required to ensure that your new venture is successful.

Building the foundations 

If you are at the early stages of starting a business but aren’t sure where to begin, you will first need to consider the process of forming a new start-up. Ranging from legal requirements like registering your business, researching the market ensuring there is a demand, to writing a marketing plan and setting up a bank account. 

At City, University of London we offer a 10-week evening course Starting Up in Business which can help you to take the next steps, with the assistance of expert guidance. 

Money matters 

Provided that you have funding secured to get your business off the ground, you will need to ensure you have sufficient knowledge of financial management so that your organisation runs smoothly. This applies to pricing of your products/services, taxation, interest and borrowings, investment, performance measurements and risk mitigation. 

The Finance for the Non-Financial Manager City short course explains the fundamentals of finance, including an understanding of standard financial statements, and operational messages that can be derived from them. 

Home is where the start is 

Regardless of if you are an online business or not, it is crucial to have a presence on the web so that people can easily access your business.  

Thankfully, it is relatively straight forward and inexpensive to build a website with many services offering free hosting tools. If you want to keep costs down and create a website that has more functionality, then you can set up a site yourself. The Building Websites with HTML and CSS3 helps you to develop the fundamental skills required to plan, design, develop, validate and maintain websites using HTML5 and CSS versions 2 and 3. 

Once the website is in place, you will need to fill it with enticing and engaging copy. What you write will set the tone for your company and how you want to come across. The copy needs to be interesting and informative, keeping in mind SEO to ensure keywords are relevant to increase your search rankings.  Writing for Web and Digital Media course is ideal to write more effectively and engage your audience.

Finally, any good website is visually appealing and can attract the attention of users. To do this, it is helpful to be able to produce creative assets and imagery to make your pages stand out from the crowd, aligning to your brand. Photoshop: An Introduction is a useful course teaching you how to utilise the software to edit, manipulate and create captivating artwork.  

Spread the word 

Having completed your market research, you may have identified a specific audience who will likely be interested in your product or service. Once this is established, the next step is to produce appropriate messaging to encourage interest. 

In the Marketing: An Introduction course you will learn the key theories of marketing and how to apply them in practice. Our introductory marketing course employs a mixture of presentations, discussion and group work, exploring how to gain a competitive advantage by applying marketing tools and techniques and by adopting a customer orientated approach. 

For a more digitally focused outlook, Digital Marketing Fundamentals  provides an overview of key digital and marketing skills, including: 

• Planning a website 
• Website promotion 
• Email 
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) 
• E-commerce and integrating digital marketing with traditional marketing. 

Perfect your pitches 

Whether you need to persuade investors to support your business venture or deliver powerful presentations to key stakeholders, being able to effectively and confidently deliver presentations is essential for communication. 

 Our interactive Presentation Skills course helps you develop skills for crafting persuasive presentations and delivering speeches with lasting impact. The programme combines insights and techniques for an effective preparation process with opportunities to put these into practice.  

Teamwork makes the dream work 

Recruiting staff is a big step in the life of any start-up and for a small business. Hiring employees is not only a legal minefield but a massive financial burden. 

Our Human Resource Management course explains practical topics such as recruitment, remuneration and administration, to more theoretical components, such as fostering good employee relations, the Human Resource course is the ideal way to develop HR knowledge and expertise.  

If any of the courses mentioned are of interest, visit City short courses to discover more. Good luck!