Resources for Nurse Business Start-Ups
A Quick and Dirty Guide to Starting Your Own Business as a Nurse:
1) First things first: Do a deep-dive personal assessment of your skills, expertise and passion – isolate those skills and passions that you could easily and enjoyably teach to others.
Do this exercise fully and completely. Fill up a whole page. Take stock of all of your experience, hobbies, interests, passions, sports, pastimes, you name it. Write them all down. Once they’re all down on the page, begin connecting the dots. For example, if you have experience working with patients with anxiety disorders and you have a passion for yoga and nutrition education. Could you not customize a practice aimed at holistically helping individuals who suffer from anxiety disorders through nutrition and yoga, breathing, and meditation?
That’s a pretty obvious sort of example, but what you want to do is to start to try and connect the dots between your experience and your interests and see what emerges from it.
One consideration here: Once you have identified what you can teach to others, you want to start thinking about whether or not people would pay for that expertise or not. Any time you can shorten someone’s learning curve on a topic that is important to them, more often than not, they will pay for it. The areas that people will most pay for help, learning or support in are: Health, Wealth (Career falls in here), Relationships and Mindset (or Spirituality). If the topic you’d like to teach falls into one of these categories, you’re almost guaranteed a hungry audience.
2) Define and select a target audience that would MOST benefit from your skills, expertise and passion
Two tips here: 1) this target audience should be a group of people you enjoy working with and 2) they should be a group of people who can afford your services. Working with unemployed individuals is great as charitable work, but it may not be a great way to grow a business, unless of course someone is underwriting it or you are receiving grants for this kind of work, but you understand what I mean.
3) Once you’ve identified what you can teach and monetize and to whom you can profitably teach it, you want to start thinking about the wisest way to structure your business…should it be a sole proprietorship, should you partner with someone who has complimentary skills, should you choose to be an LLC or an S-Corp?
Use the resources we’ve linked to below to do your research on the different types of business structures out there and how each might be beneficial for your unique plans as a business.
Seek advice from an attorney or accountant on what might be best for your plans. What we’ve chosen for our business may not be the best option in your state, so really use these resources and do your homework.
Once you’ve selected your legal business entity type, you will file it with the state, get a tax ID number from the IRS, make sure you have the appropriate licenses (if you even need any), set up a business bank account, and you’re on your way.
But that’s the simplified version, and I’m not an attorney or accountant and I don’t even play one on TV, so do your homework and consult with your own professional advisors, however, the process is relatively straightforward and simple in and of itself.
Here are the resources you’ll need:
http://www.sba.gov/content/follow-these-steps-starting-business
http://www.entrepreneur.com/bizstartups/index.html
http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=99336,00.html
http://www.inc.com/guides/start_biz/
http://www.toolkit.com/small_business_guide/sbg.aspx?nid=P01_0000
http://icoachnurses.com/resources
