What if I wanted to start a million dollar corporation? I came across this question on a business message board. The poster wanted to know the steps to take to start a million dollar corporation. Someone pointed them to an article by Ryan P. Allis. The article, posted here in the "The Millionaire Shop" channel under 100 Steps to Building a Company to $1MM in Sales, provides you with 100 steps that are key to building a million dollar company.

The first step seems obvious: Come up with an idea. You can’t start a million dollar corporation that does nothing. You can arbitrarily come up with a business name, go out and register it and go around calling yourself a business owner; but you don’t actually have a business just because you have a paper with a stamp on it to prove you’re the owner of whatever business name appears on the license.

What is a business?

From Business-law.FreeAdvice.com - A business is an activity performed for profit.

The difference between carrying on a business and a hobby is that a business has an expectation of profit, is run in a systematic, continuous and regular businesslike manner, and has ordinary commercial principles governing it (such as business and accounting records).

So if you want to start a million dollar corporation, first figure out what is going to be the nature of your business, in what area you will be focussed. Will it be in technology, medical science, biochemistry, media and entertainment? In what fields are you interested? Of what kind of company can you see yourself being the CEO? An airline, a cable network, a department store?

Once you have come up with an idea, move on to the next step of deciding what exactly you’re going to sell to make your millions. Your idea might be to create a company that is somehow related to the hospital industry, but it won’t necessarily be that you will build a hospital. It could be that you start a company that sells hospital equipment.  Your company is going to need to make money selling something, whether it’s a product or a service. The millions have to come from somewhere and you’re going to have to decide where the money is going to come from.

The next steps deal with evaluating the idea and doing research to determine if it can succeed in the market. This is followed by coming up with a name for your company and then writing your business plan. A corporate CEO-minded person will not be daunted by the task of creating a business plan. A business plan is essential. You can’t expect to conceive, build and run a million dollar corporation flying by the seat of your pants. You need concrete plans, outlined steps to follow for how to start your company and then how to build it up to the status of million dollar corporation.