Tips to ensure business continuity in the golden age of start-ups

Whether you want to start an online clothing store, real estate firm, or Blockchain venture, the economic context has never been friendlier for entrepreneurs. Funding options are more flexible than ever before, digital marketing is affordable, and customers are generally receptive of startups. At the same time, competition is becoming fiercer by the day and success is by no means guaranteed. In fact, statistics show that, even with the perks above, 90% of startups fail. A solid business plan and a great product are the basic requirements for a healthy organization, but here’s what else you need to ensure its continuity:

Mentorship and professional business counseling

Everyone looks up to entrepreneurs and expects a great deal from them. They have to be leaders, innovators, strategic thinkers, and financial experts. However, entrepreneurs are humans too and they can’t achieve everything at once. Not without help, at least. Even if you strongly believe in your product and mission statement, running an organization is never easy, especially when you’re doing this for the first time. A mentor or business counselor can help you navigate the troubled waters of entrepreneurship and contribute with their know-how to help your organization thrive. Successful businessmen like Lawrence Jemal have made companies excel so if you feel that your goals are beyond reach, don’t hesitate to ask for advice. According to the Startup Genome Report, which delves into the reasons why most startups fail, mentored startups grow up to 3.5 times faster than unmentored ones and raise seven times more money. Lack of experience isn’t necessarily a drawback if you never stop learning and know where to ask for help.

Mastering scalability

After months of planning and grinding, finally breaking through and turning your brand into a household name is both rewarding and intoxicating. While it’s normal to be excited, celebrate, and make big plans, you should also stay realistic. Growing too much, too soon can have the opposite effect and generate an internal crisis. For best results, you should try to expand slowly, based on a thorough scalability plan. Without the resources, staff, and infrastructure, small startups can become overwhelmed, encounter production issues, and fail to deliver. Overinvesting and growth for the sake of growth aren’t good in the long run. To ensure business continuity, your expansion plan needs to be realistic and sustainable.

Balancing innovation with feasibility

Buzz phrases like “disruptive”, “thinking outside the box” and “making the world a better place” make entrepreneurs want to shock and inspire. While innovation is important in business, it also needs to be rooted in the reality of the market. A product idea may sound awesome but do you have what it takes to make it real fast enough? According to a 2015 study, 42% of innovations fail because they take too long to develop and customers lose interest. And last, but, definitely not least, ask yourself if there is a demand for your product. To be successful, you need a creative spirit, but a practical sense is just as important. Once you’ve managed to reach a balance between these two, you’ll be unstoppable.

How to Start a Business: A Step-by-Step Guide

So, you have a brilliant business concept that will change the world – now what? This is a question that people ask themselves daily, but seldom have an answer. The truth is, turning a concept into a practical business is much more difficult than people would assume. However, with planning, organization, and a few proven strategies, starting and maintaining that new business idea is plausible. If you’d like to learn the best practices for how to start a business, here is a step-by-step guide to follow.

Step 1 – Think of Your Business Idea

Most business ideas begin with a flash of inspiration. Whether it’s something you saw online, a passion you have, or an industry you believe needs better leaders, most businesses are created by some sort of inspiration. The main problem several people encounter is not thinking about whether that concept is best suited as a practical business or should be allocated as a hobby.

That’s why the first step in starting a business is to think about whether your idea can be turned into a profitable business opportunity. A business should provide a good or service for a consumer group for a fair market price. Start by writing down your business idea and ask yourself whether you can turn the concept into a profitable business before investing time, money, and sweat equity. And, don’t be afraid to seek out the advice of friends, family, or other business owners.

Step 2 – Write a Business Plan

Once you’ve determined that your concept can be turned into a profitable business, the next step is to determine how you’re going to accomplish this task. This is where a detailed business plan comes into play. A good business plan outlines several important business operational steps such as defining your product, your targeted customer, operational needs, investigating your competition, creating a marketing and start-up plan, assessing your financial needs and current financial situation, and establishing a plan on how you intend on reaching your customers and stimulating business.

We’ll explain a few of these items in more detail below.

Step 3 - Complete Market Research

It’s quite possible that others have come up with your business idea prior, and perhaps they are currently in business in your area. Before you start a business, you should investigate whether there are others in your area providing similar services. Competitive market research goes much further than simply seeking out others. You should find out how they operate their business, what do they charge for goods or services, how do they connect with customers, and what are their strengths and weaknesses?

This is a part of your business plan, and you’ll quickly learn that a good business plan is always evolving the more research you complete. 

Step 4 - Outline Your Financial Needs

Every business requires some capital to start and maintain operations. Some businesses can be started progressively, with limited financial resources. However, several start-ups fail due to the part-time concept. Regardless of your plan of action, you need to determine how much capital you’ll need to operate and maintain your business before it becomes profitable. Most new businesses require a few years in order to become a profitable entity.

When you determine your financial needs, you’ll also use this data in your business plan, as you’ll need to outline whether you’ll need investment or loan capital to start the business correctly.

Step 5 – Set Up a Registered Business

The steps above will help you determine if starting a business is practical based on your experience, finances, competition, and legality. The next step is to start the action by registering your business with local government. Each city, county, or providence has unique regulations and requirements, so inquire with your municipality for specifics.

Step 6 – Purchase an Insurance Policy

Once your business has been legally established, it’s important to take steps to protect it. The first item should be to retain an insurance policy that helps provide financial support for legal defence against claims of impropriety by clients. A good start is business insurance, which will help cover legal expenses if a civil claim is made against you or your new business. This peace of mind protection allows you to focus on building and developing your new business.

Step 7 – Develop Your Products and Services

When your business has been established and you’re protected with insurance, it’s time to spend time developing your products and services. If you’re offering services (such as online marketing, consulting, or other skill-based advice) outline different levels of service offerings, such as your hourly rate, any retainers required, and terms of service. For products, begin the process of searching for suppliers of raw materials, equipment, and locations to open your business.

Step 8 – Build the Team

Some start-up businesses are self-operated, but that doesn’t need you can do everything yourself. A good business owner understands the importance of allocating tasks to other team members – as to not spread themselves too thin. In your business plan, you hopefully determined how many employees or contractors you’ll need to start. This is the time to find them and hire them.

Step 9 – Brand your Business and Start Advertising

Any good business has a solid brand identity. Whether it’s a catchy name, logo, tagline, or their identity, you need to develop a good brand package before officially opening. This is an area where you should seek professional guidance, especially since developing a strong brand takes a large-scale approach. Consider searching online, such as Upwork.com, where you can find experts in brand creation, such as building logos, websites, and professional-written content.

When your brand identity has been finished, which should include your logo, company colours, fonts, and of course, your complete website, then begin your marketing and advertising program – again established in your business plan.

Step 10 – Grow the Business

It usually takes a start-up business a few years to become self-sustainable and profitable. However, the quicker you begin to grow the business by connecting, networking, and reaching out to new customers, the sooner you can become profitable. Consider setting up a Linked-In page, Facebook, and other social media platforms to connect with future customers and educate them about your industry and the services or goods you offer. Connect locally with the chamber of commerce, or other business owners like yourself, where you can perhaps trade services to help each other grow. Your plan for business growth is another item that will be documented in your business plan. The key is to follow it initially and fine-tune it as you progress.

Developing a concept into a practical business is going to take time, hard work, and likely cost you some money. However, if you start with a proven plan on how to start a business, follow through with each step, review your results, and adjust the plan overtime, you’ll find the process to be much easier and effective.

Top tips on kick starting your New Venture

Starting a business from the comfort of your own home is a dream for many people, and although it can be difficult to navigate at first, it is doable.

According to Great Business, there are 2.9m home-based businesses in the UK, and they contribute £300 billion to the economy.

It’s far easier to start a business from home than ever before, and in this article, we’ve collated our top tips on kick-starting your new venture.

First thing’s first, you’ll need to decide what kind of business you’d like to start and figure out whether there’s a gap in the market for it. If there is, the next step is coming up with an in-depth business plan and working out what your profit will be.

When you take the plunge, unless you’ve got a lot of money behind you it’s worth building your business slowly. Most successful entrepreneurs don’t quit their day job straight away, they continue bringing in money while they’re building. Once you’ve started turning a profit, think about going full time, but to avoid going bankrupt before your business has a chance, it’s definitely worth staying in your day job.

Business site Forbes.com urges people looking to start a business to consider the costs involved. Once you develop your business idea, work out the costs and expenses. As well as notifying HMRC of your new business, you’ll need to do a yearly tax assessment and pay what you owe, so it’s worth saving as you go so you’re not hit with a hefty bill at the end.

Once you’ve looked into the finances, put together your idea and you’re ready to start, you need to prepare your home. If you haven’t already got a room that you can transform into an office, you may need to get planning permission to get an extension – particularly if you’re going to have employees working for you from home.

Your office needs to be kitted out with supplies to ensure its success, this includes computers, desks, stationery and printers. If you print lots of documents, for example, it’s imperative that you have a high-quality printer and an affordable supplier of toner or ink cartridges to ensure things continue to run smoothly.

Once your office is filled with the right supplies, business is growing and your finances are in order, you can consider becoming an employer. It’s worth noting that without a serious extension, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to have multiple employees working in your home. If you do take on employees, you’ll have more responsibilities, and GOV.UK notes that these include running payroll, paying for National Insurance and providing workplace pensions.

It is possible to start a successful business from home, and if you run it correctly, you’re likely to be searching for a bigger office in no time.

7 Business Performance Management Tips for Tech Companies

With thousands of tech companies existing on the market, every company is trying to outdo the next in an increasingly saturated competition. There are really only two ways to guarantee that you’ll do well in any highly competitive industry – superior innovation or elevated productivity.  In other words, your objective as a medium enterprise should be to come up with something that is so radically unique that it instantly occupies its own lane, or just develop more productive processes than your competitors. While we can’t tell you how to be innovative or what exactly you should be inventing, the following seven tips will help your tech business win from the other angle – performance and productivity:

1. Createa Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Track Key Performance Indicators

A balanced scorecard is a strategic methodology that looks at organisations from more than just a financial perspective. It recognises that all organisations have customers, internal processes and infrastructures. Therefore, these things need to be measured as well. Many tech companies, even medium and large ones, have started using BSCs to bolster their funding efforts, as investors often gravitate towards such reports as proof that a company will continue to grow and be profitable. If you want to learn more about BSC in action, Intrafocus (one of the leading suppliers of the software) has written up a useful guide on what it is and how it can be applied.

2. Define Peak Productivity Based On Current Output Potential

Optimising business performance means achieving peak productivity, but you can’t aim for something that you haven’t yet identified. The best way to assess this attribute is to time and measure the capabilities of your team on anweeklybasis. Once you know what everyone can do individually within the span of a week, you can realistically estimate how much should be done if everyone worked to their full potential throughout a typical month.

3. Find a Sustainable Balance and Pace

The problem with trying to aim for peak productivity on a weeklybasis is that it can become taxing on your team’s energy, creativity, and reliability. Thus, once you have defined peak productivity, it’s time to tone it down a notch to achieve a sustainable pace. As a general rule of thumb, you should only expect your employees to complete about 70 to 90 percent of what they’re actually capable of doing within the course of a week. This is an important concept for tech businesses of all sizes to understand because the development and maintenance of apps, websites, and electronic devices typically requires a concerted ongoing effort, as opposed to short bursts of intense work.

4. Strategically Increase or Lighten the Load on Individual Employees

Instead of basing your allocation of duties on the productivity potential of the average employee within each position, speak to your HR department and ask them for reports onthe skills and shortcomings of your team members. This will help you determine who should be handling the brunt of the work. Keep in mind that the most prolific tech companies invest millions in talent recruitment, always searching for the best developers and innovators. As such, if you already have that kind of talent on your team, it’s wise to take full advantage of their services.

5. Consolidate and Centralise Software Management

Every tech company relies on a suite of software to manage their online affairs. Most likely, you can relate to this because the majority of business owners in any industry use at least 3-5 online tools or platforms during the course of the average workday. The problem is, you’re wasting a lot of time and effort by switching back and forth between account and software interfaces. Fortunately, there are dashboards that can sync all of these tools together into one management interface. Furthermore, taking a consolidated approach makes it easier to export data related to all of your tools in one shot, for a more well-rounded analysis and a more convenient daily routine.

6. Set High Standards and Initial Expectations Within Job Descriptions

When your employees know exactly what is expected of them before they even start their first day of work, you won’t have to check up on their progress as much because everyone will be on the same page. A thorough orientation and on-boarding process is important in the tech sector because employees need to be given clear guidelines about how to steer their creativity and productivity within their designated roles.

7. Practice Employee Monitoring and Refine Hiring Processes

Finally, now that you’ve developed a system for training staff and tracking progress, it’s time to assess the individual performance of each team member. Take your time to set up a good HR department, hire and reward the right people and your business performance will shine as a result. 

In conclusion, by heeding the tips above you can simplify business performance management into a predictable and replicable process that can be applied by any tech business to achieve desirable results.