Starting your very own startup is exhilarating albeit stressful at times. You want your business to succeed and lift itself off the ground and be among the big players out there. This is very challenging, yet exciting for a lot of new business people.
However, a lot of startups fail to make it past five years and it’s even rarer for any to be older than 10 years. Hence, you’re going to want to have some solid piece of advice that you can really use in the long run.
Here are some things you can do to improve your chances:
Have a clear direction on how you want to grow
Everything starts by plotting out a goal. Determine where you want to take your business in the far and near future. Ask yourself how you are going to take your team there and assess what are the things that you will need to get there.
When you know which way you want to take your business, you can be guided in assessing your business performance. Taking a look at how your business is doing financially will give you an idea of whether you are still on track or not.
Things like feasibility in a certain region, cash flow, expenditures, and etc. are good parameters to see whether you are taking a step in the right direction. This will help your brand grow and develop even further.
Plan your execution
No matter how good your business idea is, you will still need to give the execution it deserves. There have been tons of brilliant business ideas out there, but not all of them were able to reach their maximum potential. Hence, proper execution is key if you want your idea to flourish in the long run.
One way to plan your execution is by disseminating it to every prospective audience that you can. Luckily for us, we have social media. We do not have to walk outside hand-out fliers, or any of those traditional things anymore. With social media, we can reach the audience that we need within only a short period of time.
Furthermore, we can even get analytics to see how people reacted to our social media posts along with their comments and suggestions. This way, we are able to scope out how the target audience truly feels. This can help us revise or solidify all of our plans for our startup.
Have a strong marketing plan
On the topic of social media, having a strong marketing plan is very essential. The survival of your brand during its first years and beyond essentially hinges on your marketing strategy. No one will buy from a company that they barely know, right?
Know who your target audience are. Including their preferences, information, purchasing power, and other vital information you need to know in order to push your marketing campaign.
Aside from getting yourself in front of the right customers, it’s not just important to only hook them to your service or get them interested, it’s also vital that you turn them into regular, paying customers afterward.
Formulate a plan on how to approach different customer life cycles and figure out how to retain them for as long as possible as loyal customers are the life and blood of any successful company.
Focus on customers
Coming off again from the previous one, it’s important to always think about your customers. Make the products and services about them and not about anything else. Remember to always take their needs into account and you will have plenty of satisfied customers.
The easiest way you can do this is by simply looking at your data and analytics. This will tell you exactly what the customers want such as, “Which products sell the most?”, “What service is availed the least?”, and other important questions you can use to make better future decisions for your company.
Using this valuable feedback to become more suitable to your customers will not only help you grow but also build a better relationship with your customers.
Do not scale way too early
This is another rookie mistake that we see in many startups. Once revenue and profits start coming in, business owners tend to get very excited and look forward to growing and expanding their business as a whole.
Often, they end up burning through their company’s financial assets by investing into things such as more office space, noncritical employees, more equipment, and others in hopes of it helping their company grow. Most of the time though, they end up in a pile of debt with no way of pulling themselves out.
One way to avoid this is by eliminating the costs of hiring and training new employees while also not having to buy new equipment for them. The only way to achieve that is by hiring a Virtual assistant in place of noncritical office employees. They can basically do everything that an assistant can do such as managing calls, dealing with clients, and even working on a specific project with you. The only difference is you don’t have to spend money scouting, hiring, and training them and they also have their own equipment and experience perfect for your needs!
Delegate tasks
In light of this, remember to delegate all the extraneous, repetitive, and time-consuming unnecessary tasks that seem to fill up your plate too. As the founder, you don’t really have to do everything by yourself. You only need to do the important things that really matter such as crucial company decisions, meeting with investors, and perhaps making a new product.
Having a Virtual assistant takes a lot of load off of your shoulders. Not only are they well-versed in the field, fully trained, and equipment ready with no additional cost on your part, they are also reliable with varying rates for their services making them more convenient to hire. Remember to also trust your team with the tasks that you assign them. Don’ try to spend all your time micromanaging everything as no one wants to work under that kind of boss.
In short, delegate tasks for you to be able to focus your energy on the things that really matter for your business.
Keep track of your financial status
Not everyone has the luxury to gamble on pretty high risks with their money. Most of the billionaires that we know of today were already from a well-off family who supported their initial business junctures with hundreds of thousands of dollars (looking at you, Jeff Bezos).
However, we do not have to be like them to become successful entrepreneurs as there are lots of other successful businessmen who truly had a rags-to-riches story. What we do need to have is good financial habits,
These include tracking every single penny that goes out of your company’s funds, being meticulous on where to make investments, keeping track of your taxes, and many more. Essentially, it’s important that you keep track of your company’s financial structure at every turn. Do not let any funds leak out or go to waste for investments with high risk but no return.
When you do this along with the other aforementioned habits, you can be sure to increase your chances of succeeding as an entrepreneur!
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