Category: Starting Up

Article Contributed by Jenn Livingston

Startups are great ways to enter the professional scene and make your name heard around the world. Nevertheless, they can be difficult to execute correctly in high-pressure situations. There are many lessons to be learned from failed startups.

Impressions

When you are trying to promote a startup, you will inevitably come into contact with many other executives. If your startup eventually fails, do not worry about leaving a bad impression. Your first impression is usually perfectly fine, but other aspects of the startup are unsuccessful. Continue to put your best foot forward when meeting new CEOs and presidents. It is a common mistake to be turned off by failed startups. The truth is, your first impression is the best you can do at that moment. When things are out of your control, you should not worry about them until they become relevant. Make your name heard and don’t worry if your initial portrayal does not work out. In this industry, a lack of confidence is one of the worst traits a leader can have. You need to be decisive and confident in everything you do. From handshakes to text messages to apparel, a solid image can go a surprisingly long way. It is worthwhile to compare your demeanor between startups and how it changes over time. Tracking your disposition is one of the most clever ways to make progress. At each failed startup, you will show improvement and eventually stray away from a hesitant outlook. I learned this lesson the hard way, but by starting now, you can avoid these simple mistakes.

Following Up After the Failure

Failure can be difficult to deal with. Nevertheless, it is important to follow up after the incident instead of completely abandoning the project. I see a lot of young entrepreneurs noticing success and immediately moving on to the next project. While this might save a small amount of time, you won’t be able to recover lost data and information. You also won’t learn from your mistakes. When I encountered a failed startup, I would take the next few days to reflect on what went wrong. Did I overcommit to one entity? Did the project have a misguided direction? By jotting these mistakes down in a notebook, I was able to look at this for future reference and fix my errors. You can take a similar approach with multiple failed startups. Send as many as emails as possible to employees, officers, and clients. With the right documentation, you can again track progress and make a firm statement.

Importance of Recruitment

Recruitment is at the foundation of every startup. In the past, I used to neglect this step in favor of a speedy hiring process. This is completely wrong. A steady recruitment session is necessary to determine the best workers for your startup. There are many ways to go about this process. If you are familiar with the strongest marketing techniques, you can use this as a basis for recruitment. Young entrepreneurs much like yourself will flock to the startup to prove their worth. Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is another fantastic strategy. When you outsource communication, you make it much easier for contacts to find your business in a heavily populated sea. In our world of market drivers, material analysis, and market overviews, it is important that you approach such a problem from multiple angles. After multiple failed startups, I decided that this technique is one of the best ways a young leader can take charge.

Conclusion

A failed startup is not the end of the world. If you treat these as learning experiences and take their lessons into your career, you will improve as a professional. Eventually, your failed startups will turn into successful ones and you will be on track for a lifetime of excellence.

Most people think that starting a business means buying a storefront, investing hundreds of thousands of dollars and creating a full-fledged startup corporation. While this is one way to do it, some of the biggest businesses in the world, including Google, Amazon and Apple, have been started by people working out of their homes. Here are four of the things you’ll need to do to start a business from your garage or basement.

Start With a Great Business Plan

Whether you plan to sell handmade craft projects or want to start a cybersecurity business, you’ll need a solid plan for exactly what your business will do, how it will run and how you’ll make money from it. Since you’ll be running your business from home to start with and probably won’t have any employees, your business plan needs to take into account the fact that you’ll be doing the vast majority of the work to start. It should, however, also include a long-term growth plan, as your goal should eventually be to reach a point where you can hire employees and increase your volume of work.

In addition to a plan, you also need to have a great product or service. Remember, customer relations ultimately come down to quality. If you can offer a product or service that’s better than your competition, your business will ultimately succeed in the free marketplace. If, on the other hand, you jump in before perfecting what you plan to sell, you’ll find it hard to make a good living in your new business.

Focus on High-leverage Marketing

If you’re operating out of your garage or basement, you probably won’t have many opportunities for customers to come directly to your location. That being said, it’s important that you use high-leverage online marketing channels to get your product or service seen by the masses. Some good ways to market your business online without having to spend an inordinate amount of money include social media marketing through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and video marketing through YouTube. Also be sure that you have a website set up before you begin selling, as you’ll need somewhere to send the traffic from these channels in order to convert it into paying customers.

Keep Your Business Space Organized

Just because you’re running your business from your garage or basement doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t treat that space like a real business headquarters. Be sure to keep it carefully organized, as you’ll otherwise waste valuable time looking for supplies or trying to remember where you set something down. Even if you live in a smaller home, you can maximize your work space with good organization to ensure that your business runs smoothly.

 

Explore New Opportunities

Once your business has reached a certain level of success, you should consider expanding it by exploring different opportunities in your niche. Say, for example, you were offering social media marketing services online. A logical way to expand your business would be to begin offering content or video creation services that would help your clients connect with broader audiences. If you can offer more products or services, you will almost certainly make more money. Be careful, however, not to overextend yourself, as you don’t want to work yourself to exhaustion by trying to do too many things at once.

Building a small business in your home may sound difficult, but if you have a good business plan, a good product or service and the willingness to work hard, you will be able to do it. Just because you’re working from a garage or basement doesn’t mean that your business is not a real one, so continue to work on it, and you’ll see it grow until it meets your goals.

Do you remember what the famous Chinese philosopher Laozi said? “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. We will discuss those steps right below.

Do you have ideas, dreams, ambition but lack a magic dash to take the first step or maybe you just don’t know much about the startups?

Take a deep breath. In fact, starting an online business is not as difficult at you might think. It consists of a series of steps that need to be taken.

Business plan

If you don’t have a business plan, you need the one. Before starting with online business, you first need to decide what type of business you want to enter into. Take into consideration your knowledge of that particular business. Think about the geographic area you would be operating out of and the geographic regions you would be selling to.

Best advice: Stick to something you know or are passionate about.

A business plan gives you more than the holistic view of what you are trying to do, but also puts things into perspective for you. Here are some free and paid resources you can reach out to regarding your business plan:

• Bplans – is an online paid website that allows you to choose from 100 business plans and write your business plan online.
• Microsoft Word Templates – lets you search through their resource for “business plan” templates.
• Score.org – offers business planning templates.
• How to Write a Business Plan – tips from Small Business Association.
• Search ~ Creative Market – Creative Market has some amazing templates for a very low price.
• Top 10 Business Plan Templates You Can Download Free.
• BizGym – all in one paid business planning and pitch development website.

A thought out business plan will make you aware of the competition, the existing opportunities, the pros and cons of the industry, etc. But what’s really important, it will highlight your unique selling point.

BTW, a business plan also acts as a sales pitch book.

If your financials are correct, you will clearly know about what your expenses will be, and what it will cost you to run this business.

Once you have determined your vertical and niche for your product &/or service, it’s time to pass over to the next step.

Here are some questions to consider:

• Is your supply line competitive and reliable enough?
• What is the competition like? How many of your competitors are from your country/worldwide?
• Will you be able to compete against them and make your way into the first search engine results pages?
• How many of your competitors are buying ads? What is the average price they are paying per click? Will you be able to compete with them?
• What is the average selling price?
• What is your unique selling point (free shipment, extras, discounts, whatever)?
• Is the product you are going to sell cyclical in nature?
• Does your market scale horizontally or vertically?
• Do you need to invest in inventory? If so, how much does that cost?
• You may also need to look into Affiliate Marketing and Drop Shippers. These two options are great ways to start without having to worry about any sales process. You simply divert the user to the sale mechanism of the company you are representing as an affiliate, then all the rest is usually handled by them. Passive income for lazy-bones. Actually, referral sales are how most of businesses today are doing business on the web.

Online selling model

Internet Marketing Model is pretty much the same for most businesses.

Supposing you have the most attractive website on the Internet, selling the exquisite product or service. Though, if you don’t have any visitors, you will not be seeing sales soon. In other words, very often we concentrate too much on making our website absolutely perfect and ignore the necessity of visitors/traffic to make sales.

To understand traffic, you need to understand your visitors first. They can be divided into destined: visitors who are destined for your website, that is, they are typing the URL or click on a link to come to your website; transit: the visitors who use your website to go to another one; accidental: visitors who did not mean to come to your website.

Now, when you understand your visitor types, it’s time to get to know what sort of traffic types exist.

The four traffic types are:

Organic:

• comes and builds up naturally
• usually involves search engines traffic as well
• comes through relevant linkages
• is slow to build up
• Google loves organic traffic as it is well-behaved

Referral:

• also Organic in nature
• comes through articles or linkages
• is usually a derivative of SEO
• when optimized – search engines are a major driver of traffic

Paid:

• not Organic at all
• existence is based directly on your ability to pay
• is “keyword” specific
• expensive – but the more sure to instantly generate traffic for your website
• most preferred / utilized method
• hinged on your ability to go keyword research

Direct:

• is Organic in nature
• word of mouth / offline referral / brand-identity
• repeat / bookmarked visitors constitute largest segment
• most internet marketers would not rely on this method alone
• largest contributor if you have a brand

Domain name

You need a domain name for your online presence. You can opt for a generic domain name, or a unique domain name. Click here to know more about choosing a domain name.

You need to keep in mind that current online stores heavily rely on online optimization and marketing. That is why, choose your words for your domain name carefully. SEO is the matter you will have to consider later on.

Hosting

Once you have a domain name, you would need hosting. There are a variety of web hosting providers you can partner with: HostGator, BlueHost, GoDaddy, Verisign, 1and1, LiquidWeb, iWeb, etc.

Website development

Once you settled the issue with your hosting, you would most likely need to have a website developed. Here you have two options: either design it from scratch or use a ready-made template from a reliable provider, like TemplateMonster.com. The latter option is simpler, faster, and most cost-efficient, but of course it’s up to you to decide which way to go.

Shipping

If you are selling physical goods, it would be a good idea to sign up with say USPS, Fedex, UPS, etc.

Now, when you are almost done with your store, you would need to take care of a couple of things:

• Telephone Number and Address for your business
• Be aware of what your tax rate is if you are shipping within the state
• Your terms of sale, terms of service, acceptable usage policy, privacy policy, service level agreement, disclaimer and legal terms all need to be worked out by an attorney. Believe us, money spent on this is worth it.
• Your refund policy and exchange policy needs to be clearly spelled out.
• Do make sure your shopping cart can handle refunds, etc.

Bookkeeping

For your accounting and bookkeeping, you can resort to a trustworthy online solution like Xero.com or Quickbooks.com.

Customer support

You would also need some form of a Customer Support/Help Desk, where your users can open support tickets or ask questions, etc. There are lots of SaaS options like Home, Web-based collaboration apps for small business, etc. for the purpose. Surf Google for “help desk” or “hosted crm” and you should see quite a number of results.

That’s it. With the above your online store is essentially complete.

Website traffic

We have already mentioned that now you need to draw visitors. The more targeted visitors you have the higher is the probability of a sale.

Most of the online websites fail because they underestimated the importance of post-website construction phase, known as traffic building. No traffic – no sales. Whether you bring in targeted traffic slowly (organically) or via paid clicks, this is an area you cannot ignore.

You can cooperate with a professional (solopreneur or company) to start online campaign for you. The online campaign is not just for marketing purposes, but it is also geared towards your search engine optimization (SEO). You would be looking at things like acquiring back links, having articles written and placed on various ezine sites, listing your website with the necessary online directories, making sure your site is indexed properly by Google and other search engines. Make sure your on-page SEO is done correctly. Your META tags and descriptions are well written, etc.

You can also get started with a small online PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign on Google, to buy ads and bring targeted traffic to your website. PPC is one of the fastest ways to bring visitors to your online store.

Every day nearly 50 000 blogs/websites go online. Think about it. What is going to make your website stand out is only how effectively people are able to search for the things they want to buy and how effectively you utilize and conquer the Search Engine Results Page (or SERPs). Don’t ignore the social media either. Today, more and more users can be found spending endless hours on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. Learn to adapt your marketing and communication by using social media.

In the end, it boils down to two things:

• The end price the user will pay to have the product/service delivered to them.
• The user experience.

It is not easy to compete with web giants, like Amazon or Ebay. That’s the truth. You need to give users a reason to come to your website and make a purchase.

Hopefully, this article would give you a clue on how to get started with your online store. We wish you best of luck with your venture!

Article Contributed by Ian Pearson

According to a study conduct by Scott-Macon, the cleaning and janitorial industry is expected to grow at a rapid pace by 2020, and as a result, the market sector will surpass $60 billion in 2017. There are more than 800,000 cleaning services companies operating in the U.S. alone, and this number is expected to grow 1.7% on an annual basis. Taking all of this into consideration, it is evident the cleaning industry is highly competitive. For this reason, we have listed 7 most essential aspects of running a cleaning business you should cover in order to stay ahead of everyone else on the market and ensure your business achieves stellar success.

1. Define what differentiates you from the competitors

In this jam-packed marketplace, it is essential to highlight unique characteristics of your business to ensure it stands out from the crowd. When choosing cleaning services, customers will want to know what you can offer that others cannot.

First step is to assess your main competitors: determine what their unique sales proposal is, not only regarding the message they are sending, but also their actions. Is there anything they haven’t already covered? Are there services they have overlooked? Take into consideration flexible cleaning schedule, offering services in the evening and on the weekends, including more eco-friendly cleaning products, and similar.

Furthermore, it’s good to incorporate yourself into one niche, instead of offering everything to everyone, scattering your resources. Pick one market to serve, focus on excelling at it, thus building consistency in the services you provide.

2. Take your business online

Setting up a business website for your cleaning company might seem like a trivial advice, but since almost 50% of SMBs still don’t have a website, we believe it is essential to emphasise the importance of this business aspect.

When establishing an online presence, you should not stop at designing a responsive website. Consider writing a blog and publishing valuable content and current industry news, sending out newsletters providing cleaning tips, ultimately establishing yourself as a field expert. You should also provide information about your team with their bios and images, as well as pictures of your work as a proof of the quality, like SBHI Office Cleaning Sydney experts did.

3. Put the focus on the customer every step of the marketing process

With many companies getting so involved in running their business seamlessly, they often forget to take a step back and define a marketing strategy that could boost their business efforts.

First off, define your company’s buying cycle, as you are likely to have customers at every stage of it. From raising awareness of your business, through discovery and the stage where they attempt to learn more about it, to referral status, when you provide satisfactory services and they recommend you to others.

4. Go through the back door

Over the years, door-to-door sales proved to be a highly effective strategy for both commercial and residential cleaning services. Sometimes, this will mean literally, other times you will sit behind the desk making phone calls. However, cold calls are not the only way of expanding your customer base. We recommend contacting real estate agents and homebuilders, as well as investing time and money into building mailing lists in order to send direct marketing pieces to higher income residents on a monthly basis.

5. Never stop networking

Especially when your cleaning business is still in a development stage, it is of prime importance to join local communities, networking groups and/or local Chamber of Commerce. In their regular meetings, you will get the opportunity to share information about your business, as well as to get to people who may be in need of your services. We advise you to offer a special discount to the first month’s billing to a person who gave you a lead that ultimately became a sale.

6. Remember that employees are your top priority

A happy employee is an integral part of a successful cleaning business, as it is the quality of their work that affects the customer satisfaction. Invest in their continual education, treat them with respect and make sure you offer them bonuses and incentives.

 7. Invest in Customer Service

Almost 60% of Americans claim they would try a new company for a better service experience – that is more than half of your customers. A quality customer service can help build strong and long-lasting relationships with your customers. Although the quality of your work is extremely important, you cannot stop at that; even if your performance is satisfactory, upon finishing the job, we recommend following up on your customers to ensure everything is still in good order.

One final tip: remember there are times when you should not take the job you are offered. If you realise you cannot earn profit or that the work is for any reason undesirable, it is better to turn it down. Focusing your and your employees’ time on a more lucrative work will prove to be a smart decision in the long run.

Bookkeeping is an integral part of your small business. If you can’t keep up with your cash flow, you’ll become another statistic about the perils of entrepreneurial startups. Clearly, you need to take control of your finances. Here are three steps for setting up a small business accounting system.

Choose an Accounting Method

The field of accounting involves many structure-based choices that will impact your cash flow and balance sheet. For this reason, the accounting method you pick is critical to your long-term success.

The choices for tracking income and expenses are the accrual method and the cash method. Most businesses use the accrual method since it’s the approved method by the generally accepted accounting principles in the United States. In this method, the business registers the sale in its books the instant the purchase occurs, even if the payment has not yet been made. For example, a furniture delivery company would document income from a sale when its employee makes the delivery. The fact that the buyer might not pay immediately is irrelevant.

The cash method prioritizes payment. When a company receives money for a product, good, or service, it notates the transaction in its books. Similarly, if the company agrees to pay for something at a later date, the expense is not recorded until the payment is made. You want to choose the process that fits your company the best. Private companies are not required to comply with GAAP, but if you plan or hope to take your company public someday, you may want to use GAAP-approved processes from the start.

Choose a Recording Method

Your next bookkeeping decision is how to keep your records. Before the age of computers, the most popular choice was by hand. Businesses would make copies of every exchange with customers and suppliers. Today, most companies use software for their record-keeping. It’s the ideal choice.

The right computer program will provide mistake-free bookkeeping. Plus, it’ll automate some of the accounting processes that would otherwise require additional labor and expense. Whether you’d outsource these processes or perform them internally, you’ll save the overhead by using software.

The most popular bookkeeping programs are Peachtree Accounting and QuickBooks Pro. Several other solutions exist, though. You should read online reviews to choose which one is best for your needs. The most important aspects to consider are whether you want cloud access and portability. Cloud access enables real-time updates from anywhere in the world, a huge asset. Portability means that you can use the programs from smart devices, which is a growing business necessity.

Pick Forms of Payment

How you pay your customers will go a long way toward determining the success of your company. You should prioritize secure payment methods that protect your interests. Some types of online payments, such as PayPal, are susceptible to data breaches. The same is true of cash that you keep in your office.

You’ll want to buy the safest payment method available, which is business checks. These documents are tamper-proof thanks to a protective coating used in their design. Even if a criminal receives one of your checks, he can’t alter the payment fields. Due to the stock used to make the checks, robbers also can’t counterfeit them. When using business checks, you can pay with confidence.

Planning your accounting is a critical part of successfully managing your business. Follow the three tips above to secure the future of your company during those difficult early years.