There’s nothing worse than muddling through the beginning of your business venture and struggling to get things moving. If you want to jump-start your start-up, then you need to make sure you’re following these ideas.
Although many of these can make things difficult at first. Getting these things right will help your business be successful in the long run.
1. Branding Matters
The way you brand your business truly matters and will have an enormous impact on how successful your business is. You need to know exactly what it is that you’re offering people and focus on just building your brand around that.
Where many businesses make a mistake is that they offer a variety of products and/or services, and they try to offer all of those to their clients. However, trying to brand a huge number of things will only confuse clients about what you do and will make marketing impossible. Although you should certainly offer a variety of services, focus on only one and brand that.
2. Always Chase Outstanding Invoices
When you bill your clients after you’ve done the work, you will quickly find yourself in debt and may end up having to fight to get the money that you’re owed. The fastest and easiest way to solve this problem is to only accept money up-front.
If you are working on larger, long-term projects for a client, then you’ll want to set up a payment plan that allows the client to pay every week or every two weeks. This will allow you to keep paying your employees and other bills while you work without worrying about when you can expect to get paid.
3. Think Twice Before Offering Discounts
When you’re first starting out and offering your services, you may have to charge a little less so you can start building your reputation and getting the experience you need to increase your prices. However, if you have a client that is asking for special discounts and low-balled services, it’s in your best interest to politely refuse.
4. Be Willing to Pay for Experience
For many start-ups, the temptation is to hire new and emerging talent that saves on cost, with the intention of training new personnel yourself. However, this will only hurt your business as you struggle to get things started and then have to pour extra time and energy into training new hires.
Hiring experienced people, on the other hand, will provide your business with more value than you can imagine. People that already know what they’re doing when they join your business will not only save you the headache of training them, but they will also bring years of experience that they can use to better your business.
5. Don’t Be Afraid to Let People Go
On the other hand, if you have people in your company that just aren’t working out, it’s better to let them go sooner rather than later. When you keep someone on that is lazy, making too many mistakes, or simply not getting along with other employees, the longer you keep them on, the more they’re going to drain your resources.
The best way to jump-start your start-up when it comes to employees is to put an evaluation system in place for every new hire. After 2 – 3 months, sit down and have a formal evaluation to see how they’re doing and feeling. If there are some problems, give them a month to work them out and then let them go if they’re still not showing a willingness to improve.
6. Hire the Right Team
Having the right team in place is the best way to give your start-up the jump-start that it needs to take off and become a well-established business. You need to make sure that your employees have the right mixture of strengths that will work well together to help you accomplish all of your business goals.
About the Author
Brittnay was an HR professional in London before making the move to Dublin. Now she is a consultant who spends her time exploring the beautiful canals, food and beaches of Dublin.