Fundamental Steps to Launching a Health-Based Business
Article By Jason Lewis
You want to start a business that helps people live healthier, more fulfilled lives. Maybe you hope to launch a local health food store or an e-commerce company that sells wellness products. Perhaps you wish to become a nutritionist or personal trainer.
The only problem: You don't know where to start.
Getting a company off the ground requires much more than a good idea and a name. You have to consider various legal and financial factors while creating a strategy for achieving your goals. And that's just the beginning!
Below, Flow Spa has given you some practical tips for turning your dream health business into a reality.
Set Up a Business Structure
One of the first legal steps you will need to take when starting a company is to choose a business structure. There are essentially four types of structures to consider in Canada:
Sole proprietorship
General partnership
Incorporation
Co-operative
The most accessible and least expensive to establish and maintain is a sole proprietorship, but it also comes with more risks. For your health-based company, consider forming a corporation to protect the owners. This will yield limited liability, potential tax benefits, and possibly present more funding opportunities.
Write Out a Budget
No matter what type of business you start, you can expect startup costs. Your expenses will depend on your unique company, but it's critical to do your homework and write out all expenses you expect to incur. It’s a good idea to add another 20% to this number to be more realistic on what your starting costs will be.
Maybe you need to invest in market research and product development. Perhaps you will need to spend a considerable amount of time, energy, and money building and promoting your brand. The key is to know what you need to pay for so that you can figure out how to cover all of your bases for a strong launch.
Look for Grants
When it comes to funding, grants are ideal because they provide money that you don't have to pay back. There are many grant programs in Canada available to entrepreneurs (including, but not limited to):
Regional Opportunities Investment Tax Credit
CanExport
Canada Digital Adoption Program
Venture for Canada – Hire an Intern
Be mindful as you research and apply for grants. You must create a thorough business plan that outlines your goals and strategies. And you will also need to know what types of grants are earmarked for your specific industry and how to fill out a grant application effectively.
Explore Other Financing Options
If you need additional financing, you have other options. Explore the various small business loans from government and private organizations. Research angel investors, venture capitalists, and incubators that can help you get your health company up and going. And don't rule out the possibility of launching a crowdfunding campaign.
Build a Team
Maybe you want to operate as a solopreneur during the early business stages. But at some point, you will need help with running your company's day-to-day. Whether web development, content writing, administrative tasks, marketing, accounting, or any other responsibilities, look to online job boards to find qualified freelancers you can hire within your budget.
Promote Your Brand
Finally, you will need a solid brand to promote and build your company's reputation. This starts with creating a logo that accurately and attractively reflects the products or services you are offering. You will also need to choose what colour palettes and typography to use on your marketing materials.
Make your brand stand for something that you support.
And, of course, you will need to create an eye-catching website that is easy for people to use and navigate. Once you have these foundational elements of your branding in place, explore the various marketing channels that can help you build your business: social media, email marketing, paid ads, and local advertising is an excellent place to start!
If you have a passion for helping people improve their health and wellbeing, starting a health-based business could be right up your alley. Consider the tips above as you lay a firm foundation for your company, and keep researching other ways you can position yourself to flourish for many years to come. You will soon be making a living while helping others achieve optimal health and wellness!
Would you like to read more helpful content or learn about our float, and wellness centre? Explore more on FlowSpa.ca today!
Setting Lofty Goals While Making Sustainable Changes
Whether you're part of big business, a small, locally-owned business, or an individual setting and striving for your resolutions, the threshold of passing from one year to the next sparks a lot of latent energy for most people.
Businesses often use the start of the new year to look forward to setting lofty goals, although the year often cycles around the financial calendar and need not be based on January 1. It's in the sustainable little changes that we see our greatest goals accomplished.
Colleen Hunt gets into this on the FlowCast this week. With her business partner at Naturally Nested, she has lofty goals for her young business but is focussed on what she can do at the macro scale to keep moving forward.
She first had a vision for what the future held for herself and her business last year when she dreamed up the idea to hold an exhibition where people could go to meet the business owners providing different wellness opportunities in the city, supporting not only her own business but the whole health and wellness community in Peterborough. Step by step, Colleen gathered the sponsors and support of other businesses to make it happen at the start of March of this year for the inaugural Peterborough Wellness Expo.
The bigger goals and the steps to get there will be unclear to you in the beginning. It takes practice and experience to figure out how you're going to accomplish what you've dreamed up. But the more that you can look at what sustainable changes you can make right now, the better you'll be at doing things that stick long-term.
As Colleen says, picture it like this: if you look at making the smallest, sustainable change once per week, you can build up many new habits over the course of the year but it will feel vastly different than the overwhelm of trying to do it all at once.
52 new changes or habits essentially makes you a new person in a year.
It's the same when looking to be 1% better. Strive to be just one percent better each day or each week and you'll 100% different before you know it.
We all envision this perfect future life and the simplest way of achieving the perfect future life is to start with a perfect day, and then a perfect week, a perfect month, and so on.
To get to the perfect day you just have to start by making your day 1% better.
So get in the routine of reflecting on your day before you go to sleep and ask yourself how you can be 1% better tomorrow?
Passion Over Profits
Profits are essential to running a business long-term but if you base your model off of profit first, you're going to have a hard go of it when things become messy.
I am fortunate to get to speak to many different people at different stages on the business journey through the FlowCast and in having started Flow Spa this year. One thing that stands out across the board is where people as it relates to passion versus profits.
Particularly if you're starting a business from the ground up, passion is crucial in my opinion. You certainly can build a business solely around profits in the monetary sense but be prepared for the grind to feel that much harder. This is a topic that Si Grobler and I got into on the FlowCast this week.
Si is working on his MBA and teaches a university course in social enterprise; a different way of operating revenue-generating businesses.
Public companies over the last forty years have been all about maximizing shareholder value. Pumping up the stock prices superseded virtually everything else so that the shareholders were kept happy.
Times are changing though.
Consumers are demanding more out of the companies that they support and this has led to a new lean towards maximizing stakeholder value. There's a lot of greed at the top in big business so it's going to be a long road to see this shift actually come into place.
Fortunately, more entrepreneurs are getting started with a passion-first perspective and as the businesses of the past decade or two continue to grow and spread their own newfound wisdom, more businesses will be inclined to follow suit.
So if you're looking to get into business and see it as something to be passionate about, there's plenty of help to be found in your local communities.