There are a number of factors you must have in place to ensure a successful startup. These are:

1. Legal Base: This includes such factors as your licenses, insurances and setting up your company.
2. Your Market: You need to decide who you want to market your services to and where they will be.
3. Your Services: You now need to decide what services you are going to offer to these people, how you would like to package them and what prices you wish to charge.
4. Your Premises: Look around for your new premises, preferably in the middle of your potential market. Remember that central to your success is the position you choose for your business. Foot traffic past your door and many potential customers within a short journey from your new business is vital to you finding customers.
5. Web Site: Most businesses have them now so even if you dont want to set one up now at least buy and hold onto your domain name in case someone else gets hold of it.
6. Your Business Plan: Whether you are looking for funding or not a business plan is the foundation of a new business.
7. Your Funding: You should now take your business plan and look around for funding, starting with your Bank.
8. Your Staff: Good staff that reflect your business ideals are vital so spend some time spend some time finding the best staff you can.
9. Marketing: So important and so difficult to get right. Start with a good marketing strategy and go from there.
10.Grand Opening: Make sure you make a splash and attract as much curiosity as possible.

Lee Lister

Lee Lister is Management Consultant and Program Manager with more than 25 year's management and consultancy experience and more than 20 year's program and project management experience in projects for Banking, Finance, Insurance, Leisure and Government bodies. She also have more than 10 years bid management experience ranging from bids for medium companies to large international and infrastructure bids.

British born, Lee received her BA(Hons) Financial Economics from the University of Essex. She went on to work in or for a considerable number of countries within Asia and Europe as well as Australia and the United States. While building a name for herself through helping company restructure, change management and project management consultancy, Lee became a well-known figure for her skills in analyzing, problem solving and trouble-shooting. She has consulted for many major industries, including banking, telecommunications, insurance, transportation, leisure and governments from many different countries. Some of the companies who have benefited from Lee?s expertise are Hewlett Packard, Siemans Nixdorf, Electrolux and the Philippines government.

Whilst working in the Far East she became a recognized expert on preparing and evaluating large World Bank Proposals (infrastructure projects within developing countries). These accomplishments called upon the skills of bid and project management, risk assessment, contract negotiation and supplier management and required dedicated work to very tight time scales. This expertise was acknowledged by an invitation to be the principle speaker at an International Business Development Conference in Washington, USA. She has also consulted at very senior level in several countries.

She owns and manages two companies, Biz Guru LLC in the USA and Biz Guru Services Ltd in the UK as well a considerable number of profitable web sites. She works almost entirely via the internet, visiting clients on site during major consultancies and training. Her Internet skills span from when major companies first started to consider obtaining their own web sites. During these years, she has kept up to date with the rapid changes on the internet, including the dot com boom and the resulting bust ? which her own web based companies survived.

She regularly consults, writes and lectures on business, bid management and marketing and has published numerous courses and books.