Yay! Congrats! You’ve decided to start something new and exciting-but now, where the heck do you start. Everyone is telling you where you should go and what you should buy and how many times a day you should post on Instagram so that you can drive traffic to your site.

Here are the 5 Things Every NEW Entrepreneur Needs when starting their business and in true Madison Anaya style, they’re of course going to be centered around growth.

If you were to ask me the things you needed to get when deciding to follow your dreams as an entrepreneur you might be surprised to find that not one of them costs any money. In fact I feel that the most important things you need, the foundational elements don’t cost anything at all.

1. Know Who You Are and Whose You Are-If you have no concept of your identity, in fact I’d even go a step further in saying if you don’t have a solid understanding of who you are and whose you are, you will fail before you even have a chance to see the fruits of your labor. Yikes! That sounded kind of harsh. Sis, here’s the deal. If you don’t know who you are, you will look to everyone else to see how you should be chasing your dream and what exactly it should look like. If you want to avoid getting caught up in the never ending merry-go-round of the comparison game, imposter syndrome, and analysis paralysis because of other’s opinions of you, you need to make this one a priority.

2. Understand Your Why-Friend you were made on purpose, for a purpose, and now you have to pursue it with purpose. This means being intentional about why you want to do this in the first place. Your why has to be bigger than because you want to make a lot of money. It has to be so deeply rooted inside of you that when things get hard, and they will, that you can fall back on your why to keep pushing you forward.

3. Take Risks That Have the Potential for You to Fail-If you never take a leap of faith, you’re never allowing God to move in faith. How can you ever expect to make huge jumps if you never trust in yourself and in God enough to let your dreams take flight. Is there a possibility to fail, heck yes! Don’t look at failure as the enemy. It’s the worst feeling in the world, but it can be the best compass if you let it be. Failure teaches us, it guides us, it tells us what areas of our lives need work.

4. Create a Strategy-Faith without works is dead. You need a strategy in place. If you’re just aimlessly wondering, how will you ever know if you’ve reached your destination. You need a plan set in place because as John Maxwell so beautifully puts it, “Hope is not a strategy.”

5. Surround Yourself with a Community That Gets It-You need people. It’s that simple. We need people and not just anyone. We need people who get why were fighting so hard for this. We need people who believe in us and who are pushing for us to grow. We need people who won’t hold us back out of their own personal fear and convictions. You may be saying, “Mads, that sounds great but where the heck am I supposed to find those people?” You’ll find them if you want to, if not you’ll make excuses. One of my biggest supporters is a friend I’ve never met in real life before halfway across the world. We talk every Monday and always start the conversation with, “How can I help you this week? What can we do to make things better than last week? How can we push forward?”

Starting a new business is incredibly hard. It comes with challenges and mountains you didn’t even know were possible. It’s also one of the most rewarding things you can encounter if it’s truly your why. Set yourself up for success with these 5 foundations and remember success without failure is just luck so don’t be discouraged by it.

I’ve created a FREE (and pretty!) Download for you with these 5 foundations so you can hang it in your office, on your mirror, in your car-wherever you will be reminded daily of where to start. Fill in your email below to get the download!

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