3 Tips to Help a Young Business in Its Early Years
When starting a small business, you don’t always do it with everything perfect from the beginning. For one thing, you might not have a year’s worth of personal expenses saved up. Also, the plan for how you’ll secure your first few customers might be less fleshed out than it should be. Nevertheless, you’ve gone ahead and started. But what now?
Here are 3 tips to assist you with your young business to get through the early days.
Get Creative About Finding Customers
If you’re providing a service, then getting in front of prospective buyers is difficult. If they haven’t heard of your company yet, most managers won’t take a meeting because they don’t know you. And, if you’ve already exhausted all your business connections, what should you do?
Look at inexpensive or free ways to find new customers for your service. Ideally, you want to demonstrate the value you can bring to them rather than being outright selling. The young business audience will be far more receptive to that approach when they are yet to hear of your brand or solidify their perception of it.
Use business forums, Facebook groups, and even Quora to post answers to questions that prospective customers are asking. When providing useful feedback and answering queries, you position yourself and your business as a knowledge leader even if you’ve only just recently started.
Don’t Spend Too Much Too Soon
Once the business is up and running (even if it’s a one-person operation initially), it’s tempting to buy everything new and overspend. Sales teams actively look for new businesses because they have new money to spend and are easy targets for slick sales techniques. First, start a company bank account so that you don’t make the mistake of getting your personal and business finances mixed up together.
Create a budget for everything that you’ll need in the coming year. Then go back through the list, and look for alternative ways to skip the purchase, buy it previously owned or get a steep discount on the new price.
Be Prepared to Take a Pay Cut
Many founders of a new company don’t plan to take a salary from the business for a year or longer to let it have a better chance to grow. Depending on what your arrangements are, you may decide that you wish to reduce what you’re drawing from the company. In so doing, you’ll rely on your savings and investments that you’ve already set aside.
If you’re doing this, then it could be a good idea to also rely on easy loans to get you through. These are small amounts from £50 up to £1,500, which are usually repayable in a few weeks and no longer than one year. Should your savings and investment take time to liquidate, this can provide a stopgap before your assets become liquid again.
The most important thing for any new business is to ensure its survival. Precious few businesses manage this feat. But, by running a tight ship, your business can be one of the few success stories. Once this is achieved, building a growing, stable business is the next hurdle to leap over.
