When starting your entrepreneurial quest, there are SO many questions on your plate, that it feels impossible to find out which questions are the most important to tackle.
What should I sell? How should I market? What should my business name be? What branding should I go with?
But there’s one question that will answer your prayers if you tackle it first.
This may sound cliché, but I’m talking about LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!
Where should you place your business? Even if it’s an online business, this is still an important question as you’ll soon see.
Just because a city is a good place to live, doesn’t mean it’s automatically a good location for your small business, or for you as an entrepreneur.
And after all, you’re trying to make money here, right? What’s the point of doing this if not to make you rich?
So, give yourself the best opportunity for money-making, and look at what really makes a location prime real estate for your small business. It just might be where you’re already living.
One thing you hear a lot when discussing small businesses setting up shop is the “cluster effect,” which is just the tendency of entrepreneurs to attract more entrepreneurs.
Think about Silicon Valley. There’s a classic cluster effect.
There are many advantages to being part of an entrepreneurial cluster, but you need to get in at the beginning.
So how do you do that? How do you get into the entrepreneurial cluster before it becomes an established cluster? Well, it’s easy, you just look for these signs that lead to the most profitable location for your small business.
Here’s what you need to pay attention to.
The first thing you need to do is look for cities where small business makes up a good percentage of the total business. Cities with higher relative concentrations of small businesses are more likely to offer the resources and access to these resources that are beneficial to small business.
So, look around your own city. Are there a lot of small and local businesses? If so, you know that it’s an entrepreneur-friendly place.
The next thing to look for also ties into the one we just mentioned, and that’s to look for small businesses that also accept credit cards.
Small businesses, whether they’re a physical storefront or just a booth at a local market, that accept credit cards do infinitely better than those that don’t.
They make more money and are more popular and lasting, so small business is regarded as more successful in these cities, and often better treated by consumers.
Another good aspect to check out is median family incomes. It seems like it would be an obvious step, and it is. Nothing fancy here, just higher incomes means more available money to spend on goods and services.
And more spending money is always going to be a good thing for a small business.
Now this next one might not seem as obvious, but it’s a very important thing to check out, and that is businesses with online reviews.
In today’s world, consumerism is being propelled forth by the internet, and businesses that have online reviews are infinitely more likely to be found and visited.
A huge component to the boom of a small business is word-of-mouth, and online reviews are invaluable for that.
Additionally, small business is already recognized as the most trusted industry, so a city that has a lot of online reviews for businesses is really making the most out of that benefit.
At the end of the day, you want your business to boom. You want to be raking is as much money as possible, and location is so important for that.
You could have the most incredible, never-before-seen, completely revolutionary product, and it’ll be irrelevant if you don’t know where to set up shop.
Finding the perfect location for your business could take you from zero to literally millions of dollars.
And the best part is, you might already be living there. So, don’t let not knowing where to start hold you back from reaching your dreams of a booming business.
Remember the cliché: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!
