5 Crucial Steps for Launching a Business This Year

Establishing your own business can be one of the most exciting parts of your career. Starting your own business offers many opportunities and allows an entrepreneur to choose his or her own hours and spend more quality time with family. You may have more fun at work and even be able to choose the people you work with at your startup. I started my first company when I was 23 and I recently started another one in the online invoicing space called Sighted.com.

Launching a new business takes a lot of time, energy and courage. If you skip steps, you could set yourself up for failure. Start your 2017 off right with these five crucial steps every new business needs to be prosperous.
1. Know your industry and what’s missing.

Starting your own business is about more than just knowing an industry. As an entrepreneur, you should make it your mission to find a gap in the market that no other company has thought about. For example, eXp World Holdings Inc. achieved this by being the first to take its real estate company to the cloud. Other companies are now following the lead of eXp World Holdings.

Dave Ramsey's 10 Steps to Success

If you have ever so much as Googled the word debt you’ve probably heard of national radio host, TV personality, author and money management expert Dave Ramsey. The no-nonsense CEO of Ramsey Solutions is on a mission to get American families out of debt.

He has a popular story: The young bankrupt husband and father rebuilds his life and starts a business that grows from a church Sunday school class into a 500+ employee media empire. Along the way he wrote five New York Times bestselling books, grew his audience to 12 million weekly listeners and has had more than four million customers go through his flagship program, Financial Peace University.

I jumped at the chance to join him at Ramsey Solutions in Nashville, Tenn., recently and ask him how he bounced back and built his mission into a massive success.