What are your 10 "Do's" and "Don'ts" for starting a new business?

1. Create a one page business plan complete with mission statement, competitive analysis, first year revenue projections and expenses.
2. Create a project management plan with deadline dates and owners assigned to each task
3. Ensure you have enough capital to cover the first year of expenses including your own salary assuming that you are not going to make a sale for the first 6 months to a year while you are getting the business ready for launch
4. Come up with an easy-to-remember, catchy name, make sure it hasn't already been used and register it with you State business bureau.
5. Make sure the dot com version of your business name is still available and purchase the domain for 3 years with the option to renew. If it isn't available, find out how much the owner of it is willing to sell it for, if you can't get a deal, come up with a new name.
6. Don't skimp on logo and web design for your new company. Image is everything, and you want your logo and web site to be eye-catching and convey the message about your company that you are trying to send, and appeal to the market you are targeting. Don't even think about a DIY web site or getting a friend who took a few dreamweaver classes to do it for you. Tacky, cheap looking web sites and logos will do you more harm than good.
7. Get business cards printed and attend as many networking events/relevant trade shows as possible to begin making contacts.
8. Learn from your competitors - what's working for them, what isn't. Where are they advertising, how much are they spending on marketing, what can you do better than they can.
9. Begin thinking about SEO and have a plan in place to ensure your web site will rank highly for major keywords related to your business in organic search results - you want to minimize your spend on paid search - this will save you thousands over the long run. Invest in a good copywriter and someone who has a good knowledge of leveraging social and online media to drive traffic to your web site, without paying Google a fortune in rent.
10. Hire interns to do grunt work for free, for example managing your social media campaigns after you've had guidance from a professional on how to set these up effectively, pulling prospect lists from Jigsaw, LInkedIN, appointment setting, warming up lead, handing out flyers or pens with your company web site at trade shows.
11. Partner with ancillary companies in your industry, ask them for space at their booth at a large tradeshow rather than taking on the cost of hosting your own booth.
12. Never rely on one investor for more than 20% of your expenditure for the first year, you don't want to have to shut down if one gets cold feet all of a sudden.
13. Work on building good credit under your business name, it'll help if you personally already have good credit, as you will be maxing out all of your credit cards in the first year. Be sure to pay your vendors on time so they can act as trade references for new vendors you will want to request favorable credit terms with.