
The First Year: Ensuring Your Small Business Gets Through…
When you’re starting a new business, the first year is always one of the most frightening points. You don’t know whether you’re going to sink or swim, and it can be worrying to invest a lot of money and time into a business that may not work out as you want it to. Here are some tips on how to make that first year a success.
Surround Yourself With The Best People
When you’re starting a company, you may not have a huge amount of cashflow, which may mean that you want to spend as little as possible. However, one thing you should invest in is good staff: this is much more important than an incredibly sleek and expensive office, for example. Finding people who are dedicated to your company and what you do may be difficult, but they will be worth their weight in gold. Whether you go for extremely enthusiastic graduates or people who are more experienced in their fields and really know everything about what they are doing, the most important thing is that you communicate well and are focused on your end goals.
Learn To Network
Networking is the perfect way to drum up new business and to simply make people aware that your business and your product exist. Go to as many networking events as possible, and make sure that you go up to people to introduce yourself. Make sure that you boil what your company does down into one sentence so you can explain it in a way that’s easy to understand and that doesn’t meander on.
Get Financially Savvy
It’s a good idea to be as good on the financial side as possible. This may not be easy if you see yourself as a creative person who provides ideas, which is often the way that a person who begins a start-up may be. But being good at figuring out your accounts and paying the correct amount of tax will save yourself a huge headache further down the line. If this doesn’t appeal to you, accounts is absolutely something you can outsource – there are plenty of resources and companies online like https://www.qaccounting.com/accountancy-company/ that you can check out for help.
Provide Excellent Customer Service
The best way that a small company can compete with a big company is through impeccable customer service, and this is something that you should strive to provide right from the beginning of your company. This is what will keep clients and customers returning to you time after time, and what will make you stand out from all the other companies that provide similar services (because let’s face it, very few ideas are completely unique in this extremely busy world!). Make sure that you follow up with people to ensure they are happy with your product, and keep checking in with them. A face to face meeting will never go amiss either – people know that time is valuable and that they are important to you if you meet in person.
Although starting your own company can be nervewracking, these easy tips should help you sail through the first year entirely unscathed!