 Welcome to the wide world of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Katharine Norr. Today, our topic is how to start an eSports business, a step-by-step guide. I hope you've been watching the show for the last three years. It's been such a pleasure promoting people in the eSports industry and eSports businesses. So far this year, we have had people from GamerSync, BitGamer, Gamers Glorified, Unified, Advantage Video Systems, Momentus Insurance Company, so many people who are doing so many interesting things in the world of eSports. If you want to be on my show, please message me on LinkedIn. You can find me at Katharine M. Norr. So let's get going and let's talk about how to start a business in eSports. So the first thing that you're going to want to do is ask yourself, why do you want to start a business? There always has to be a why. And after you really understand what you're doing and why you're doing it, then you need to come up with a name. That's actually kind of tricky. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. But let's talk about the business plan. Once you know why you're going to start it, you know the name of your business, then you'll want to create a business plan. There are many resources online and people that can help you with this. However, the first thing you'll want to have is a mission statement. What is your mission? What is your goal? Work on creating the most eloquent mission statement that can drive you through hard times in your business. And you can always look back and always make sure that any people that you're working with or your employees or independent contractors know about your mission statement. So everyone's on the same page. You want to determine your business structure and ownership. Are you a sole proprietor? Do you have a partner? Are you starting a corporation? Is it a limited liability company? That's one of the first things that you're going to be working on in developing your business plan. And to do a market analysis in your business plan, you'll need to show a market analysis. Who's your target market? And how are you going to reach that target market? And what are your competitors doing? That's all part of that portion of your business plan. And of course, this is pretty fundamental, a description of your products or services. Are you selling a really cool new keyboard or do you have a particular product like a new mouse that is going to make gamers more efficient? Do you have a service? Are you doing events, putting on events in the eSports area? Are you providing accounting services to eSports companies? You'll want to define what that is. You can always broaden it later, but try to see if you can define it in a very narrow way to start with. And then in the business plan, you'll want to have a marketing and sales strategy. How are you going to market? Are you going to be marketing this on the internet? Do you belong to eSports Trade Association? Are you going to be marketing to your fellow association members? Will you have a sales team? Are you going to be selling to other businesses? Is it a B2B, B2C business? Every person is a sales person, so just keep that in mind when you do this. You'll want to determine what your funding needs and resources are. Have you saved money for this? Is that where the funding is coming from? Are you going to get a loan? Will you be getting money from family and friends that's a common way that people get money to start a business. They borrow from family and friends. Is your partner in the business going to chip in 50%? It's very hard to get a loan when you haven't even started and you can't show any revenue yet, but it's possible. You might want to go to the small business administration, the SVA, see what you can do. You might seek to find to get a grant and you'll want to determine your financial projections. When will you start making a profit? Will it be year one, year two, six months? And what will those projections be? This all will help in trying to get funding and the business plan is a way to communicate what your business is to a lender. And you'll definitely want to define your niche. Are you hosting tournaments? Are you coaching players? Are you providing esports education, a gaming product? Are you in the health and wellness industry? Are you providing professional services? I've had many people on my show in the last three years who have been in these different sectors. And what a lot of people will tell you in business is that the more narrow your niche is, the better. We have a tendency to think that we need to reach a huge market, but you can actually do a little bit better if you have a very narrow niche and you're finding that very specific customer. Think about your ideal customer. How old is that person? What is their gender? Where do they live? Think about that ideal customer when you're defining your niche. And then you'll want to understand your market. That means that you need to research your target market. And like I said, your ideal person that you are selling to or the ideal company that you're selling to, research your competitors. I mean, you don't have to go spy on them, but you will want to understand who those competitors are. What are the current market trends? And what are the popular games that influence your business? What are player preferences that influence your business? And what is your potential for growth? So all of these fit together in understanding your market. If you don't understand your market, you don't have as good of a chance to be successful with this new venture. All right, so I'm a lawyer and, but I actually feel like it's very important to find that lawyer, that tax attorney, that CPA who can provide the information that you need when you're starting up a business. And you'll need to find out what laws impact your business. You need to find out what regulations, what statutes, what case law is impacts your business. And you'll also need to contact your local department of commerce and consumer affairs and local tax department to find out what kind of licenses you need and what kind of regulations that you need to follow in your startup. You will have to file documents related to your name. You'll have to file licenses for tax, but they have to be done at a particular time in your startup process. Some of them don't have to be done early and can be done a little bit later. But part of this is deciding which business entity that you plan on having. Is it a limited liability corporation? Are, I mean, company, are you a corporation? Is it a partnership? And then for tax purposes, you also need to find out what you need to do in relation to that. Are you gonna have an S corp? Because there's tax and legal implications in anything you do in this business formation. And so you want to make sure that you do this properly. And I highly recommend that you don't just find a form online. It's better to consult with an attorney or an attorney that handles businesses. Because you don't wanna go to a personal injury attorney or a family attorney. You wanna go to someone who specializes. And same thing with a tax professional or a accountant. You will want to make sure you understand all of the implications of what you're doing. And I also need to add here that you need to look into insurance as well. You'll want to talk with your insurance agent or broker and find out what kind of insurance that you need. Sometimes you actually, in order to work with particular clients, you have to have particular insurance. They require you to have cyber liability insurance, for example, or professional liability insurance. You may need that. As an attorney, I need to have professional liability insurance. Some of my clients require cyber liability insurance. The office that I lease, the office space I lease, they require insurance. And I have to provide certificates of insurance. If you're an event manager, you'll probably need to have particular insurance in order to do that. And get an insurance certificates and put those events on your insurance policy for that particular event. So all of this is important and should constantly be evaluated. You also, if you have employees, you also have to think about workers' compensation insurance. And there might be unemployment insurance that you have to pay out, payroll insurance. I'm sorry, yeah. I mean, you have a lot of those different elements that are part of this. Securing funding. I kind of talked about this a little bit before. And this is obviously really key. If you are working your day job and you're doing a side hustle and starting a business, that's how you're funding your business, probably. And that's a really typical way of funding a business. In fact, I would tell you that it's probably better to keep your day job while you're starting that new business. I know you hear on Shark Tank that they say that you have to be at all in, but maybe it's better to wait in gradually. So give that some thought and look into all of the different means of securing funding. But keep in mind that if you're funding it using credit cards, it's a high interest rate. If you go to a bank and ask for a loan, they may turn you down because you have no track record. This is a big challenge. You may have to plan this in advance and get your first clients. But there's a lot of resources out there. Look at YouTube videos on this. Look on the internet that you will find options. And there also is venture capital. That's a possibility. One thing really neat about the eSports next conference is they do have an elevator pitch contest and you get to pitch your business. And that's a way to kind of gauge how people think about your concept and whether it has market viability. So those kind of things are really good to kind of get into that space. Next, build a team. Well, that might be something you do later on but you will need a team. Your team may be independent contractors who are doing particular things. Like for example, I have in my law firm I have independent contractors who are paralegals, who are attorneys, who are billing people. I might use a website developer. And I use, there are a lot of services that I could use. Also bookkeeping services, CPA services, your team may not be obvious to you but you may just be putting together this kind of loose team of independent contractors. However, at some point you may have a team that includes employees and includes other managers, supervisors. As a business gets bigger, you will probably need to delegate the big organizational tasks to that team. One thing about business as businesses grow, they need to possibly restructure. So don't think that that business that you develop is going to be exactly the same. It will change and evolve as revenue comes in and as it grows, you may grow out of your current space that you might be leasing, you may be working at home but ultimately have to lease a space. And in doing so, you may be bringing on employees, assistants and then it may grow even further and you may have to look at a total organizational restructuring. But building a team means finding the best people that can execute the strategy who are in line with what your vision is, what your mission statement is and that you feel fit with your company culture. You always have to look at your company culture before bringing in that person because if you bring in someone that doesn't fit with the team, it's going to be very difficult and it takes longer to get rid of them. So be very wise in making those decisions as to who you bring in. It also does matter when you're looking at partners. I'm a creative person and my business partner is a more into details of more numbers and accounting. And that's a good partnership because a business partner shouldn't be someone exactly like you but should fill out your, the skill set. So when you bring on team members, you want to make sure that they are not just like you that they actually have skills that you may not have. So there are a lot of complications in building a team and make sure you look into this very seriously when you're going about doing so. Now let's look at branding and marketing. You'll want a professional website. You can actually do this fairly cheaply. There are platforms that you can make your own website like Weebly or Wix or GoDaddy and that's something you'll probably want very early on and you'll want to drive people to that website. You'll want a professional logo. Now we go back to that name. Well, and when you're looking at website, what kind of website, what kind of domain name do you want? Do you want to have an extender.com or .gg or .co? Not so easy to get that name that you want because so many are taken. I finally figured out recently that if you go on godaddy.com for example and you look at a particular name, the next time you look at it, the .com is gone. It might be there one day and it might be gone the next. With regard to a logo, you can get a free logo made. There are logo sites that will do free logos. However, unfortunately, some aren't so good. You may need to pay for what you get. Presence on social media. Now this is something you can do for free and early. You need to put a lot of time into it. LinkedIn is crucial. You might want to try a Facebook, you can have a Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. There are many options, but you do need a social media presence. And YouTube, that's a great way to get views. So work on that every day and ultimately people will be able to find you. Marketing strategies, you'll want to come up with a solid marketing strategy. Follow that marketing strategy. You have in your business plan. And you may have, you may partner with others in your marketing strategy. You may also decide to do paid advertising. Facebook ads that you might do ads on others. You might find a partner that would be a good partner to advertise with or market with. So this branding and marketing piece is essential. All right, now let's look at operations. You have to know how to operate your business. Are you running tournaments? How are you going to be running those tournaments? Develop those, develop this operations. Like how are you providing services? What are you doing? What is your, what do you do to put on these events? Do you need customer service? Are you going to use AI for customer service? How are you providing services? Is it all on Zoom? Or are you meeting with people in person to provide that service? Are you doing consulting? Do you need to actually go to the businesses where you're, in order to provide that consulting service? If you have products, how are you producing them? Are you producing them in the US? Are you producing them in China or another country? So all of those elements go into operations. All right, now you're ready to launch. Launching may be very insignificant. It might be a matter of putting up your website or doing that first tournament. It could be providing that first service to that client. Whatever it is, that's your, it might be a soft launch. You may do something a lot bigger. You may have a launch party or something like that. But once you launch your business, then you go forward and build it and create more content on market to more potential customers and hopefully earn the money that you and the profit and the rewards that you were hoping for in order to meet your mission. And then, okay, so as your company progresses and grows, you'll want to constantly assess it and determine whether you might wanna take out certain things that you had. You might want to eliminate certain services or products or you always need to refine it and determine whether you're going in the right direction. Are you, did you make a mistake? Maybe you thought you were gonna go in one direction and it turned out that the business is really in another direction or you got an opportunity that came about that actually is more lucrative and you've kind of shifted. So you'll wanna assess this. And when you assess it, you're gonna have to go back and go through the steps again. You want to perhaps redo your mission statement at some time throughout your business, you may decide that you need additional funding. You might wanna go down a different marketing path. You might need to change your operations. These are all things that you are going to be improving, growing on, developing, you're constantly, it's like a living entity. Any business will constantly need those adjustments. And management in order to do so. So as an owner, you'll need to constantly be looking at that. Now, I hope you have gained a little bit of information that will help you start your business. And if you are interested in promoting your business on the wide world of eSports, please contact me through my LinkedIn site. And I appreciate you joining us today. My guest in two weeks will be Christopher Silvernagle of Premier Travel Media. Thank you for joining us, see you then. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.