A Guide To Getting Your New Business Off The Ground
By Business Desk
Thursday, August 15, 2019.
There are few things in life that are more daunting than starting your own business. It’s a huge investment both in terms of money and time. Here are some tips that will enable you to start the best business that you can, and achieve maximum success.
What About Your Day Job?
First things first: are you going to quit your day job? Although you may want to focus full time on your brand new business, it may not be a smart idea to completely cut your day job out of your life just yet. Making a huge gamble and a leap of faith is a great idea, and it’s also an extremely romantic notion that might appeal to you, but the truth is that it may not always be the smartest thing to do. Having that regular money going into your bank account every month will enable you to keep going with your own business without worrying about your everyday personal expenses like your rent and your bills. Initially you may want to keep your own start-up as a side hustle purely so you don’t run out of money early on and stall.
Source
Create A Business Plan
You need to make sure that you create a business plan. Become aware of what you want to do with your company and where exactly you want to go with it. It’s a good idea to find a place between reaching for the stars and being realistic. Although you want your business to be a huge success, and hopefully it will be, realistically you won’t be making a huge profit within the first two months and you need to make projections that are accurate and that will enable you to keep going even if things don’t turn out as positively as you would expect them to. Your business plan is also a way to attract potential investors, so you want to make sure that it’s clear from your plan that you have your head on straight and that you aren’t delusional about where your business may lead.
Do Your Market Research
No matter what incredible and unique idea you may have had, it’s important to remember that someone has almost certainly had an incredible and unique idea before that is remarkably similar to what you have thought up. Take a look at what else is already out there and work out what corner of the market you can take over, and what gaps exist that you can fill. You need to figure out who your market is so that you can target your advertising and work out who exactly you’re selling to, and you need to ensure that what you’re selling actually appeals to the right people. It’s important to be flexible – making changes to your business plan is okay. In fact, it’s expected and absolutely the right call if things aren’t turning out as you expected.
Source
Get Your Finances Right
Before you start a business, you need to make sure that your finances are in place. Most young businesses need to take out a loan to get themselves off the ground – small business loans UK can give you more information about that. There are other ways that you may be able to find the money to start your business. Angel investors are people with high net worths who are looking for young businesses to invest in and to provide financial backing for. This may be a one time investment or an arrangement that lasts longer than that. If you’re looking for an angel investor, remember that they’re looking more for entrepreneurs with promising futures rather than the business itself. Make sure that you’re an inviting and attractive prospect by arming yourself with figures and information – and most importantly, passion for what you do.
Do You Need An Office?
It’s important to consider whether you really need an office or not. It can be tempting to rent the nicest premises that you can find and fill those rooms with high tech gear and beautiful furnishings, but the truth is that may not be where your money should be going. A lot of start up businesses run out of the owners’ homes initially, so it may be a better idea to set up a good home office and to communicate with your employees electronically via email, virtual workplaces like Slack, and conference calls. You can hire meeting rooms so that you can meet everybody in the flesh for meetings and so that you can bounce ideas off each other in person, but it may not be necessary to hire full time offices right at the start of your business.
Hire The Right People
Hiring the right people is absolutely vital when it comes to getting a business off the ground. You need to consider what exactly you need: many young businesses work excellently with a mixture of people with a lot of experience who really know their stuff, and employees who are in their first jobs, who are excited to learn the ropes, and who have a passion for what they are doing. It can be difficult to know whether you’re hiring the right people: make sure that you check references to ensure that they are being entirely truthful about their work and academic history, and make sure that you talk to them during interviews to find out what kind of person they are instead of simply going over their resumes. Knowing people’s interests and skills is much more important than knowing what exactly they did day to day in previous jobs – what is crucial to your company is the ways that they can develop when they’re working with you. You should make sure that you’re absolutely transparent during the hiring process about subjects like salary and what people will be doing day to day, so that they know exactly what to expect from their new role.
Source
What About Freelancers?
When you start a business, you may not even need a full time staff. Hiring freelancers could be a much more effective way to spend your time and money initially. Not only will they be working remotely so you won’t have to pay for their office space, but you can also hire them for a certain amount of hours each week so that you can work with people who are specialists in their fields but who you may not need all the time. A social media expert, for instance, may not be necessary for forty hours a week, but they will be important for a couple of hours each day, which they can arrange around other freelance jobs that they may have. Remember that even though you are passionate about your business, you do not personally possess every skill set under the sun. Outsourcing what you aren’t amazing at to freelancers is a way to preserve the quality of your business from all sides. Why should you have to work out payroll if your time would be better spent developing the product itself?
Learn To Promote Yourself
It can be difficult for people to work out how to promote themselves effectively, but when you start your own business it’s an important skill to have. Staying quiet and being subtle isn’t the best way to go – what’s the point in having a company if nobody actually knows about it? – but at the same time you need to find a middle line so that you don’t bore people about what you’re doing and put them off. Attend networking events, talk to people in a friendly and open way, and make sure that you carry business cards with you at all times so you can hand them to people who seem to be interested in what you’re doing. Being persistent but not obnoxious is the best way to go.
Source
Create A Great Website
Creating an excellent website is absolutely vital if you want to make a success of your business. Having an online presence is important in today’s often online world, and you need to make sure that your website is completely clear about what it is you do. Write an elevator pitch for the website front page – sum up your services or your product in a couple of sentences to pull people who are browsing online in and to entice them to look at the rest of your site. Remember to make your website easy to navigate – label the menus, and have an extremely clear contact page so that people can get in touch with you easily. You should include a phone number, an email address, and a physical address so that people can contact you in a way that’s easiest for them. If you don’t have an office just yet, why not get a PO box?
Starting a business is a frightening and incredible thing to do. Remember to focus on the customer, first and foremost: you need to focus on providing a service and product that they will need, in a way that appeals to them.
