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How to Start a Business That’ll Succeed: A 10-Point Guide

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article | Starting a Business | How to Start a Business That'll Succeed A 10 Point GuideIt is only natural to worry about failure when starting a business. However, don’t let the fear stand in the way of what could be a profitable company, which could potentially change your life.
To set yourself up for success, you need to understand how to develop a strong business model and to avoid the potential pitfalls that could thwart your venture’s growth and profitability.
To kickstart your idea, here are 10 helpful points to help with starting a business that will succeed.

1. Find Your Passion

Never launch a business for the sole reason of making money. If an idea or industry doesn’t light a fire inside of you, then avoid it at all costs.
You will need to dedicate a significant amount of time and energy into building and maintaining a successful enterprise, so it’s critical to love what you do.
It is this passion that will help to push through setbacks, gain in-depth knowledge about the industry, and wake up every morning with the sole aim of growing your brand and acquiring new customers.

2. Gain Experience

A lack of experience could lead to a lack of success in your chosen industry. For example, if you have your heart set on opening your own restaurant, you must gain experience in the food industry.
You’ll need a solid understanding of the level of hard work, passion and commitment required to run a restaurant, as there is more to it than hiring a chef and marketing your venture.
Gaining experience will ultimately provide the tools you need to kickstart a successful restaurant or could prevent you from making a big mistake.

3. Earn a Business Degree

Aspiring entrepreneurs would be wise to earn a business degree, which will provide them with the in-depth knowledge and skills they need to run a small or large company.
There are now several superb degrees budding business owners can choose from. For example, you could embark on a Masters in Business Administration online, which will take 18 months to complete and you can customize the course to suit your needs. You could also study health management, operations management, global leadership, or supply chain & enterprise resource planning. It can prove invaluable for those hoping to start their own business in the near future.

4. Start Your Business While Employed

Don’t quit your day job because you have a great business idea. It could potentially take a long time until your new venture generates a profit.
A part or full-time job will keep money in your pocket while you’re developing your budding brand. Once your business considerably increases its profit margin, you should quit your career to focus on your new company.

5. Start Networking

You don’t need to wait until your business is officially up and running to start networking. Line up potential clients or customers by reaching out to individuals, brands and organizations. For instance, you can form connections via LinkedIn, ask professionals for advice, or attend local networking events or groups to develop strong relationships in your chosen industry.

6. Write a Strong Business Plan

A business plan will provide your new enterprise with a roadmap to success. It will provide your company with a direction, as you’ll need to set objectives, define strategies, and set targets to work towards. It can, therefore, prevent you from sinking your time and money into unnecessary areas of the business.
In addition to providing you with a sense of direction, the business plan can also help you communicate your vision to potential partners or investors, who could be integral to your company’s success.

To write a strong business plan, you’ll need to:

  • Perform market research
  • Feature detailed information about your marketing strategies
  • Identify your target audience
  • Determine potential obstacles
  • Feature realistic goals

7. Turn to the Professionals

The prospect of performing every internal task yourself might seem a little daunting, which is why you’ll be happy to know you don’t need to go it alone when running a new business. For example, unless you have experience in bookkeeping or accounting, you could outsource a professional accountant or bookkeeper, who could save you more money than they could cost you.
You also must not cut corners when writing contracts either, which could lead to potential legal and financial issues in the future. If you don’t have a law degree, hire a lawyer to write up a contract for you. Never perform tasks you’re not qualified to do, as it could lead to your company’s downfall.

8. A Financial Investment

Think carefully about how you will fund your business. If you don’t have money in a savings account to rely on, don’t expect to walk into a bank to secure a loan, as most traditional lenders don’t like new ideas.
They also are often only willing to work with entrepreneurs with a proven track record in business.
Rather than skimping on different areas of your business, which can inhibit your growth and damage your brand, you should consider the following financial options:

  • Approaching potential investors
  • Saving money out of your own pocket
  • Crowdfunding
  • A business loan from a lender or loved one
  • Refer to your business plan to estimate exactly how much money you’ll need to get your new business off the ground.

9. Develop a Cohesive Brand Identity

Mixed messages, different color schemes and varying tones of voice can lead to a confusing brand, which will indicate a lack of professionalism and attention to detail.
Your website, social media profiles, brochures, flyers and print ads should feature a consistent voice and message, which will help you to develop a standout brand that will convince your target audience to become a customer.

10. Choose Your Team Wisely

When the time comes for you to hire your first employees, you must ensure you build your team wisely. Not only must they have the appropriate skills and qualifications for a role, but they also should have a positive, hard-working attitude and their personality should complement your desired company culture.
As a result, you can create a strong, productive and passionate team, who will help your brand to grow from strength to strength throughout the years.

The Dos And Don’ts Of Creating Effective Business Videos

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Business Video|The Dos And Don'ts Of Creating Effective Business VideosCreating valuable and interesting videos is one of the smartest things you can do if you want to get incredible results for your business. Your audience are more likely to watch a video, and far more likely to be entertained by it than by a blog post. A video can get across information in a much shorter amount of time, too, meaning you can spread your message easily and effectively.

If you’re thinking of creating effective videos for your business, read on for some dos and don’ts that will help you.

Do Offer Something Of Value

Don’t just make videos for the sake of making videos. You should offer something of value to the people who will be watching. Could you create a how-to tutorial, or give tips of some kind? Sharing your expertise will go a long way to ensuring people watch your content again and again.

Don’t Make It Boring

Although you’re providing value and trying to help your audience, there’s still no reason that your videos should be boring. Try to make them entertaining. Speak in an engaging way. Use a fun background and demonstrations. Do a little more than sit there and talk in a monotone voice.

Do Edit It Carefully

You will likely need to edit your video when you’re done to ensure it is as streamlined as possible. You may need to edit out moments where you take a long pause or lose your train of thought, for example. It also looks more professional if you don’t see you messing with the camera before/after the video.

Don’t Forget To Show Off Your Brand

Make sure you consider your brand throughout the video, and how you can use this as an opportunity to show people what your brand is all about. What is your brand voice and personality and how can you incorporate this? Think about it carefully and ensure you are consistent across all of your videos.

Do Know Who Your Target Audience Is?

You should know your target audience like the back of your hand. People who watch pharmaceutical videos are likely going to be very different to those who watch home DIY tutorials. They are two very different audiences and should be catered to accordingly. Make sure you create a few personas so you can work out how you’re going to entertain and engage the people watching.

Don’t Post The Same Thing On Every Single Platform

Posting the same thing on every platform can be a mistake. You’ll usually post a very different video on YouTube compared to TikTok for example, although both could be beneficial to your business. Make sure you know the differences between each platform.

Do Pay Attention To Your Video Analytics

Looking at your analytics will give you an idea of what is working for you and what you can perhaps improve on. Looking at these closely will help you to make better content in the future!

How will you make effective business videos? Leave a comment below!

How to Boost Your Profits

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances ArticleAmerica is built on the spirit of entrepreneurship. There are over 28 million small businesses nationwide, and a further 22 million that are solely operated. That’s a large number of businesses that contribute to the country’s economy. However, the number of businesses that fail within the first four years is a significant 50%, and out of the survivors, only a third will reach a decade.

Running your own business is a challenge no matter what industry you are in or the products and services that you provide, and there is no singular reason for these failure rates.

Common Reasons for Business Failure

Failing to plan

For your business to be a success, you need to make both short and long-term plans. You need to identify your goals and define objectives that will help you reach them, from the next few months through to the following years. Your goals will shape every business decision you make and give you direction. They need to be quantifiable so that you can assess how successful the actions that you take are. This is important; how will you know what is working and what isn’t if you have nothing to measure?

Ignoring customer needs

The customer is always right. That’s a correct statement, surely. Not always, but it has you relate to your customers that will affect the success of your business. In the digital age that we live in, there has never been a better time to truly understand your customers’ and clients’ needs and wants. Always keep an eye on what your customers want and tell you about your business; their perception of your business may be very different from what you intend. They are fickle, and your business needs to be able to respond to emerging trends, feedback and correspondence. It requires flexibility and patience, but if you not only listen but hear to what your customers say, you will reap the rewards.

Lack of profit

Lack of profit is very different to lack of revenue. Your business turnover may be high, but that does not mean that it is a profitable business. For your business to grow, the profit needs to flow. There are several reasons for a lack of profit: poor management decisions, cash flow problems and premature scaling; all can be related back to a failure for adequate planning. Only 40% of small businesses are profitable – the others either break even or lose money. If your business is not making a profit, you need to assess every aspect of your business so that you can identify why you are not.

How to Boost Your Business Profits

The quandary you have is how to generate more sales while reducing your expenditure. While your current efforts have been successful to some extent, you must maximize the opportunity to turn a profit.

Modify your strategy

You need to implement a new strategy to do this. Research online about how other successful businesses in your niche have succeeded. The chances are high that they have switched to a more relationship-based model that uses technology to improve their customer experience and loyalty. Here is an example of how this change in strategy has been used to grow a law form, check it out.

Increase the product selection

To increase sales, identify which products you can cross-sell to existing clients and customers. You already know that they are interested in your niche, but are there other relating products that your customers will buy from elsewhere? An example of this is for a yoga clothing company to sell yoga mats. The key to making this cross-selling strategy work is to comprehensively understand who your current and target customers are. Know what they want and what they need. You can incentivize your customers to buy more from you by offering bundles and discounts.

Review operational procedures

There will always be aspects of your operational functions that can be improved upon. The Japanese word ‘kaizen’ translates as improvement, and is the name given to a strategy that works on the principle that all employees work together to improve process incrementally. Kaizen is a valuable mindset to adopt and can dramatically reduce waste and improve a business’s profitability. It is imperative that you get all staff members on board and seek their feedback on how to improve your business’s function.

For example, a sub-total column on an invoice can help speed up the efficiency of your accounts department; introducing cloud-based technology so that your teams can collaborate easier, or even something as simple as moving the printer’s location to be nearer to the receptionist can help to make working more efficient. Kaizen is not a one-off experience, consistently aim to improve efficiency. Ask your employees for their recommendations and act upon the information that they give you.

Regularly review expenditure

You may just have been focusing on the income and profit columns of your account reports; however, you need to pay equal attention to your costs. Businesses evolve over time, and so you need to make sure that your regular outgoings are still relevant to your business today, and not based on historical data.

Review your running costs and identify areas that you could save money. Rolling contracts are a great way of controlling cash flow as you know how much money is leaving your account and when, but they can also make you complacent to other deals that are currently up for grabs and can save you money.

Are there routine tasks that you can outsource? Or, would it be more cost-effective to hire someone on a part-time or freelance basis to complete jobs that you currently pay for a full-time member of staff or do yourself? Outsourcing can be a great solution to boosting efficiency and profits; you only pay for the project that you need completing.

You should also review your suppliers. There may be better market deals that you can access that may not have been available when you started out. It can be risky, as there is potential to damage the relationship you have with your current supplier, but it is worth opening the conversation up, just tread carefully.

While it can seem daunting to undertake such a thorough review of your business, it is critical for your business to be a success. You need to adjust your business to the changing times and embrace technology to help your customer’s user experience and increase the efficiency of your organization.

First I Launched My Company And Then I Had To Start Learning About Managing A Product.

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article | First I Launched My Company And Then I Had To Start Learning About Managing A Product.To some degree, I always knew I’d launch my own business. I just didn’t know which field of study the company would rest in. So after spending much of my 20s working in finance and real estate, and then going to business school, the right opportunity sat in front of me. In 2011, I formed SquareFoot, a new kind of commercial real estate company, to address growing companies and their office space needs.

We spent those early years building our website and fleshing out our marketing and messaging to reel in clients who suited our solutions. For a few years, this process worked well for us, and I took it on my own shoulders to grow in my knowledge first and then my role and leadership to include more. As I managed the real estate component of the company, and pinch-hitted adequately on the marketing front, too, I came to realize that I wouldn’t be able to carry the team in one crucial element: product.

My thinking on this was simple – There were three areas of the business that needed to be top-notch for us to succeed: 1. Real estate, 2. Marketing, and 3. Product. I could handle the top two, but not the last one. Not if I wanted the company to deliver on the vision I had. So I set out to hire a COO who could. I needed someone with complementary skills to mine, to fill in the gaps and to lead the other half of the organization. That person’s background would be, ideally, the inverse of mine, someone who was strong on product, could assist with marketing, and likely wouldn’t know the first thing (at that point) about negotiating real estate deals.

Over the past 3.5 years, I have been a stakeholder in the success of our product management, not the leader. And both the organization and our clients are better off because of it. I sit in on meetings where our COO and the rest of the team outline how and why to build out the product offering to give our clients more and better tools. This is an ongoing area of growth for me. Much of the interactions we have with clients are in-person, which falls into the real estate category of our negotiations and communications, but we must also have a high-quality website and app to match the promises and commitments we’ve made. I know we’re in good hands.

Some CEOs are product-first front their experience, skillset, and interests. They have a leg up on people like me who are catching up as they go when it comes to product, and depend on others more able than them to lead that portion of the business. But, I’d argue, nobody has done it all, or can do it all. For the product-oriented founders, they’ll need to eventually hire a business-oriented executive to help them build and grow for the future. What’s most important in these thought processes and conversations is to be honest and upfront about your own limitations and how those may be standing in the way of valuable progress or long-term success.

Since every company is different in makeup, there’s no definitive time to expand the executive team. You know it’s the right time, in my experience, when you feel in over your head again. As discussions internally began to mount among junior team members looking to me to make the ultimate decision, I was comfortable and confident in the real estate and marketing areas far more than I was when it came to product. It reached a point where I had to acknowledge and accept that I would eventually make a bad misstep if I didn’t turn to someone who was more capable of handling those situations and circumstances. That’s not a sign of weakness for a CEO, it’s a show of maturity. As SquareFoot grew in employee count and in client base, I had to grow in my leadership, too. Bringing on my counterpart then helped accelerate that growth overall across all metrics.

The advice I’d give to CEOs first starting out is to try to manage it all for as long as you can. But also be realistic and honest about when that style ceases to work. These are good problems to have, as it means you’ve tackled and conquered many layers of company growth to reach the point where you can no longer scale yourself to cover it all. Bringing on someone at that time is a smart move. Finding the person best suited to balance out your weaknesses with their strengths is the best path toward reaching what you set out to do and continue to seek. For me, that was understanding that product wasn’t something I could pinch-hit on. Once I turned to an expert, I haven’t had reason to look back.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Jonathan WasserstrumJonathan Wasserstrum is the Founder / CEO of SquareFoot a commercial real estate platform based in New York City. Founded in 2011, Squarefoot helps companies find their next (and next) office space.

Renovating Office Space

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Office Space|Renovating Office SpaceThere might come a time when as a business owner or commercial landlord you will need to make renovations to some office space. Unlike home make-overs, commercial spaces must accommodate business needs and those of the staff. If you are closing the office doors for a while as you give the place a face-lift, the experts suggest reading through https://www.industrialdoorsolution.com/ for knowing maxims to protect your office space. Also, here are some key points you need to focus on.

Décor

Most offices are decorated in mundane, boring color-schemes. Even though it is important to keep the space looking professional, consider adding some flair to its design. Incorporate the business brand into the décor with either a mural or having the logo on the office windows and doors. You may want to introduce some plant-life into the space, too. This has been known to be beneficial to staff and helps promote a more positive working environment.

Electrics

As a business you should be having regular checks on your electrics anyway to adhere to health and safety standards. If you are making renovations you might want to consider how you will need to have the wiring redone to fit in with the new office model. It’s also a good opportunity to identify any problems you have with your current electrics. Hire commercial electricians as they will have the most experience working in environments like this.

Facilities

As an office, you will need to have specific facilities available to your staff. Think about how you can refurbish staff bathrooms and break-rooms to make them more comfortable. If any of your employees like to cycle to work, you should have a shower room installed for them to use. You may also want to make the break-room bigger to accommodate a larger team or introduce new perks like a ping-pong or pool table they can enjoy on their lunch hour. Providing these things could help to boost morale in the office and encourage productivity.

Accessibility

It’s also important to consider how accessible your office is for both staff and visitors. People with disabilities should be able to get to your office no matter what floor it’s on, and automatic doors should be installed for ease of access. Where necessary, think about having wheelchair ramps installed to further improve the accessibility of your office. Additionally, you should consider security measures such as key cards or fobs that can be given to your staff. Not only must you protect the business’s equipment and confidential files, but the safety of your staff from potentially harmful intruders is essential.

Equipment

Finally, consider the new equipment you would like to have installed in the new office space. It’s highly likely that you will need adequate IT resources such as computers and projectors, but is there anything else you would like to add? Perhaps new equipment for the break-room would be a good idea? Or any other additional items that are relevant to your particular business.

Make sure your staff members come back to a wonderfully equipped new office space, with top-quality facilities and an overall improved working environment to enjoy.