The first thing you need to do before starting a business

I was watching a British made series about entrepreneurship on the weekend. The focus of this episode was a pair of couples who started a hotel.

They invested a lot of money into the hotel (furniture, renovations, etc). When they opened for business they seemed to have one problem: no guests!

Only after they were bleeding so much cash that they almost had nothing left did they realise that they had to get moving on marketing and getting guests into their hotel.

Lesson learned?

The first thing you need to do before starting any business or venture is to ask yourself:

“How do we sell this?”

Only once you’ve figured out how to do this, should you even consider moving onto the next phase of your business.