January is generally a really good time to start. We have all the best intentions for the new year, we have made our new years resolutions and are on the path to forming new habits. This year, record numbers are expected to register their new business ideas.
At the back-end of 2016, we conducted a bit of research which showed when small businesses generally bought domain names in a given year. The spike shows that the number of websites registered in in January each year. In fact, based on the past five years activity, British entrepreneurs are up to 10% more likely to start a business in January than any other month throughout the year.
Entrepreneurs tend to captialise on the New Year spirit in the first week of the New Year, with the number of new registrations during this week growing by 20% year on year. If this trend continues, we expect that around 10,000 new year business websites will be registered in the first week of January alone
One entrepreneur who has grown her New Year’s resolution into a successful business is Catherine Piddington, a luxury artisan jam producer and founder of Piddington Jams.
“Starting my own business was a lifestyle choice – I knew what I wanted and the best way for me to get to that point was to be my own boss and take control of my future,” explains Catherine Piddington.
“Starting on a new path at the start of the year gave me motivation, but also gave me the year to develop my brand and build my product line. The first thing I did was to build an online presence – I knew this would lend the company an element of legitimacy, reassure the customer, and allow us to widen our reach, to globally entice and captivate people with the world we were creating. It also happened to be how Selfridges found us – had we not been online we would not have been invited to pitch.”
Another example of such a successful business starting out in the month of January is Shepper, an on-demand visual inspection service. Ben Prouty, CEO, said: “I’d always wanted to start my own business from scratch and I knew that by starting in January it would give the company a clear run and an opportunity to build momentum. The biggest challenge in the first month was to quickly identify our target customers and figure out how to find them. There really was no option but to be online as the core to our business is the ability to connect people.
“Online tools to manage customer payments and keep an eye on the accounting side of the business has been integral to our success, and now having done a lot of the groundwork our focus for this year is international expansion.”
There is no better time to start a business than now.
