How can you reach the dream without going through the nightmare? Here are 10 vital steps to finding and making your own business a success.

Step 1. List five things you do best. Include things that others compliment you on or that you especially enjoy doing. Consider trades, skills, hobbies, interests and activities. Review your life for unfulfilled dreams as well as opportunities for growth. You may enjoy working with flowers or organizing travel excursions or giving valuable advice to others.

Step 2. List how others would benefit from what you do best. To be profitable, a business must offer valuable products or services to others. For example, if you are good at working with flowers, you can help others grow them, select them, arrange them, sell them, prepare them or maintain them. In each case, others will benefit from what you do. The more they benefit, the more you will profit.

Step 3. Find out how to give people what they want. Where can you get the tools and materials you will need to help others? If you want to help others with travel, for example, you’ll need to learn what travel-related businesses are available, how to find customers, how to find travel resources and how to make a profit at it. You will want to clearly understand the business’s “process,” its requirements and its output.

Step 4. Learn the value of your services to others. What are people willing or able to pay for your products or services? If you’re not already one, become a customer of the type of business you want to start. That is, if you want to become a computer consultant, come up with a problem you would typically solve and begin interviewing computer consultants on what they do and how much they charge to solve the problem. Also, interview people who might become your customers. Find out what they want and how much they pay for it.

Step 5. Find out who else offers similar services. Every business has competition. Check the local telephone book and national trade magazines to find your potential competitors. If possible, become their customer. Or at least contact them for more information on what they do and how they do it. You should know more about your competitors than your customers do.