You’ve filed all the appropriate paperwork and fully fleshed out your business plan. Business accounts have been opened with your preferred bank and an office space has been secured. It might feel like you are ready to open for business, but there are still a whole host of factors that need to be dealt with before you start up in earnest.
Starting up a business, big or small, is an exciting but stressful event. There’re so many moving parts to turning a business idea into a reality that sometimes it’s easier to set certain tasks aside to be completed later. However, there are certain aspects in starting a business that you won’t want to put off. The sooner you get these finished, the earlier your business will reap their rewards and begin to function as a profitable entity.
Insurance
One of the very first things you should obtain as a newly minted business is comprehensive business insurance. Depending on the nature of your business, you might find that there are some types of small business insurance that are more important to you than others. Regardless, you never know what could happen, so it is smart to cover all your bases early on.
The broadest and most useful of these different types of business insurance is liability insurance in the forms of General Liability insurance and Professional Liability insurance. General Liability insurance protects your business if it is found to have been responsible for another’s personal injury or property damage by helping to cover the cost of claims. Professional Liability insurance is similar, covering the cost to resolve claims wherein damages were suffered due to omissions or errors in the services or products your business provides.
If you have employees, acquiring worker’s compensation insurance is essential, as it will protect both the employee and the business in the event of a work-related injury of any severity. Commercial property insurance covers damages incurred by your business property in the event of a natural disaster or similar event. If you plan on using company vehicles, commercial auto insurance is mandatory in most states and will cover the costs of auto accidents that you or your employees are involved in.
Acquiring business insurance is not only a sound business move, but it can also make or break your start-up. Mistakes are bound to happen at some point or another but can be devastating if they occur during the early stages of a company’s life. Providing both your business and employees with protection from litigation should be an early priority, as the longer you wait, the more risk you expose your employees and business too.
Analytics
Analytics is one of the most important factors that contribute to the success of a business. Properly implemented analytics can reveal the weaknesses and strengths in a business model, predict trends within the industry, and help to maximize profits and avoid mistakes. Analytics has changed the landscape of the business world, offering companies insights into their competitor’s business and giving them an edge that would have been impossible a couple of decades ago. Because of this, waiting on conducting your analytics can sink your business before it even gets up and running.
Competitive analysis can help to identify a business’ competitors within their niche, whether they are direct competitors, indirect competitors that may edge into your niche, and perceived competitors that may offer an alternative to your product or service. The best way to conduct competitive analysis is through identifying your top business rivals and discerning what keywords they are ranking for in Google searches. Once you have identified how much traffic they are receiving, it is a simple matter of directing that traffic towards your own business by generating competing content that is of a higher quality than that which your competitors produce.
Data collection is no longer a challenge in the business world, but the analysis of that data remains difficult. Predictive analytics help a business to make smarter decisions by predicting outcomes ahead of time, giving a company insight into safety risks, understanding trends and optimizing production, distribution, and resource management. Businesses only capture a portion of their potential value, but with the power of analytics, a business can flip the script to maximize profitability and streamline nearly every aspect of the business. When you leave analytics out of your business, you are essentially leaving money on the table and allowing your competitors to maintain their edge against you in the marketplace.
Capital and Profitability
It can seem redundant, but a business that isn’t generating profit is running on borrowed time and without a doubt will end up failing. Avoiding financial difficulties is relatively simple. You set a budget and stick to it in conjunction with the implementation of analytics and obtaining the appropriate insurance to protect against litigation and legal fees. Businesses that fail to adhere to their budget or underestimate startup costs can find themselves dead in the water with little to no recourse, other than to start all over from the ground up.
While running out of capital is a serious concern for any startup, there are ways to get your business up and running with minimal financing. First, develop both short- and long-term goals for your business that are tangible and achievable. This will provide your employees and the company a clear objective to work towards. Then, if you’re unable to acquire traditional investors through standard methods, look for business grants or even crowdfunding platforms to raise the necessary capital. Crowdfunding is quickly becoming a norm in the business world, and there are plenty of success stories out there to vouch for the efficacy of a properly implemented crowdfunding campaign.
When starting a business, don’t forget to overestimate costs on all fronts. This will give your business some financial wiggle room, helping you to prevent any disastrous financial missteps. Work to get your business generating cash flow as soon as possible, even taking on pre-orders and deposits on your product or service to guarantee regular business. Another way to develop a loyal customer base early on is to attend trade shows where you can give away product samples or other promotional items that don’t have a huge impact on your bottom line.
Conclusion
While starting up a business has never been easier, and there are plenty of incentives to do so, people can still make mistakes. Not all mistakes are insurmountable, but actively side-stepping avoidable mistakes will help your business flourish. All businesses are different depending on their niche, and because of this, some of these tips will be more applicable than others. But if you at least make the smallest attempt to put them into practice, it can only help your business succeed in the long run.
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