Start Your Business in Eight Hours: How To Plan Your Business in a 9 to 5

Launching a business can be overwhelming when you don't know where to start. While anyone can make their business venture a reality, you need the right tools to begin. Prepare to take a day to yourself to focus on starting your business within the span of an eight-hour workday. The timeline below, courtesy of the Ontario County Chamber of Commerce, will point you in the right direction.

Start Your Morning: 9:00 to 11:00 a.m.

Take advantage of your early morning productivity to draft your business plan. Include your intent for the company, your target demographic, and how you hope to receive funding. Business structure and formation are critical to your company overall. Consider forming an LLC for the tax advantages and benefits of less paperwork and limited liability. Consider using a formation service to avoid the hefty cost of a lawyer. When looking for a formation service, check the reviews to ensure you receive the best possible service.

Break for Lunch: 11:00 to 12:00 p.m

Stress can wreak havoc on your health. Make sure you give yourself a break in the afternoon to nourish your body and take your mind off the business. This is an excellent time to relax, meditate, or even get some physical activity into your day. Business owners who do not take time for themselves throughout the day and ignore their basic needs tend to have more cases of mental illness. Experts suggest that many entrepreneurs suffer from depression and anxiety, according to the University of Michigan’s Center for Entrepreneurship. You could alleviate it through self-care during the day, including taking your lunch break.

Early Afternoon Planning: 12:00 to 3:00 p.m

Start your afternoon thinking about marketing. Marketing is critical to the success of your business. Think about who your target demographic is. Make notes about who you want to sell your service or product to and determine how you can market to them. Different demographics stick to other areas of the internet. For instance, having a social media presence for your business on Facebook can reach older adults.

Consider hiring help for marketing and delegating other tasks. Women Who Money explains two of the most common choices - employees or freelancers that could help you regularly. Make a plan for finding talent, whether you want to post job listings or hunt for talent on business social media like LinkedIn.

Finish the Day Strong: 3:00 to 5:00 p.m.

Start to look into organization tools for your business. For instance, if you are working on a project with multiple people involved, you have to find a way to deal with an overflow of documents. Use a PDF merger tool to save all of your files as PDFs, and combine them into the same document. Once in the same document, you can rearrange the pages in the correct order to make documents easier to find. 

Organizational tools keep your company productive day in and day out. To start planning your business in one day takes a lot of motivation and focus. Different apps can serve other purposes for your business, including:

• Time trackers

• Shared notes

• Task-tracking

When you have ways to communicate with your team members and track all documents and data, it makes productivity much easier. During the latter part of your day, spend time researching different organization tools and online options for business productivity.

Scheduling Your Day

When you schedule blocks of time to plan your business, you'll be surprised by how much you can get done in one day. Make sure you know how you want to form your business and if you wish to create an LLC. Then, think strategically about your marketing - how what you’re doing is different and who would be most interested in your product or service. And then implement tools to help you and your new team make the most of their days. Together, these strategies will set you up for many successful business days to come.