This is Step #10 for 30 Days to Starting a Niche Business.  Each of the steps to creating a niche business will be documented in more detail.  

This is the first step to turning your niche product into a high-powered money maker.  Without creating processes to produce your product or service, you will never be able to provide a consistent product or service that scales easily. 

Open up a New Document and Start Writing

Literally open a new document and create a bulletted list.  This is almost a brainstorming session so don’t worry about having everything detailed out.  Just think of everything you might need to do when you sell to a new client.  Here are some ideas you might need to think of.

• Remove them from the sales funnel so they don’t continue to receive communication to buy from you.  That looks very unprofessional.
• How are they going to be billed?  Did they already make the payment or do you need to invoice them?
• How are you going to collect payment(s)?  If it is a one-time fee, what do you need to do to get payment from them?  If they will be billed on a recurring basis, what information to you need to track for that?
• Do you keep track of all of your clients?  If you have some sort of CRM tool, enter their information so they become a client that you can track.  If you send your clients regular updates via e-mail, make sure they are added to any of those lists.
• Are you going to follow up with them directly?  If so, how?  When you receive an order, the first thing you should do is indicate to the client that it has been received.  Maybe this is an e-mail, a call, or something that’s sent to them.
• Do they have to do anything?  If they need to be part of the set-up process, define how that’s going to happen.  Maybe you need to e-mail them some information or send it via the mail.

Most importantly, get their service or product off to them as soon as you can.  Every business is different in what this entails but one key metric you should always track is the time to deliver the product/service to your client.  This will reduce the amount of time until you get paid, which means more money for you quicker that can be put to advertising and getting new clients. 

Go Through the Set-Up Process Yourself

Once you have brainstormed all your ideas for the set-up process and gotten it somewhat organized, go through the set-up process yourself.  You could do this with one of the potential clients that you contacted about doing a trial.

When you do the set-up process yourself, you’ll find steps that you missed that you can add.  You’ll also have an opportunity to add more detail about how everything needs to be done.  The goal is to eventually turn this over to an employee or contractor so you really want to make it idiot-proof.

Give it to Someone Else

Once you tested it and feel that it’s “idiot-proof”, test that out.  Ask someone else (employee or someone you hire for just this) to walk through each step and complete the set-up process.  By going through the process with someone else you will probably find some steps that were missed or weren’t exactly clear and you can fix it.

This Works for All Businesses

No matter if you are building a product or service based niche business, you should have a set-up process defined.  If you are selling a product, there are still activities that need to be completed to complete the customer experience.  It might just involve fulfilling the order and billing but the better defined that problem is, the less problems and headaches you will have later. 

If You Want to Learn the Next Steps . . .

Subbscribe to our RSS feed to be notified when the next post comes out detailing the Next Day in Starting Your Niche Business.

You can also review the 30 Day checklist and see the other steps in 30 Days to Starting a Niche Business.