Category: Starting Up

Article Contributed by Rosanie Martinez

Many new or aspiring entrepreneurs know the importance of a company logo. As a matter of fact, ask any new (and young) entrepreneur about the first things they did, and there’s a good chance that one of the first things they worked on was a logo that should be easy to recognise and works well in building their overall reputation from the start.

When creating a logo, one of the things you should do is to go on a search engine to check out big and small companies and their logos. In the process, you will find logos and elements that look great, and you might want to create something similar or incorporate those elements to your logo. While it’s generally a good idea to incorporate what works, you should only do so if it helps articulate whatever message the logo needs to convey. Otherwise, the symbol is rendered meaningless.

What’s Your Message?

Ultimately, the process of logo creation involves translating your message—your business’s purpose—into an image. So make sure that you know the reason why you’re running that kind of business in particular. To make the purpose of your business crystal clear to you, you need to write a clear mission and vision statement.

Logo creation also involves deciding on what distinct ‘personality’ your company should have. Is it serious, or is it lighthearted? What ‘quirks’ does your company alone have? What types of customers are you targeting?

Standing Out

Find a logo that’s similar to yours? Look for a way to make your logo different from that logo. Adding another element is the best way you can go about doing this.

Flexibility

The logo should work on Banner Pen, a business card, a billboard, or on the siding of a truck. It must be scalable, memorable, distinct, and easy to reproduce. While your logo can include a silhouette or even an illustration of something that represents your product or service, it might become indecipherable once reduced or enlarged significantly. So if you have an illustration on your logo, consider changing it.

You should also make sure that the logo you create is one that you can reproduce in black and white. This way, all elements of the logo are still clear even if photocopied, faxed, or used in an ad with only black and white colours.

Mind Your Company Name (and the Nature of Your Business), Please

If your company specialises in the creation and sales of jewelry, you are better off creating a classy logo. If the word ‘lighting’ is part of your company name, you can make an illustration of a light bulb part of your logo.

Beware of Clip Art and Stock Logos

While the use of stock logos and clip art can be tempting due to their accessibility, they are so easy to copy. And because they are so easy to copy, using them makes it even more difficult to stand out among your competitors. With original art, you not only stand out among other businesses similar to yours, you make a better impression of your company.

Notes on Current Logo Trends

Do you have an existing logo you think looks out of style? Avoid redesigning an existing logo just because you feel that you should adapt to new trends in logos. By doing so, you risk alienating your present and future customers from your brand. However, if you believe you should make changes, implement each element gradually.

Other Things You Need to Know About Logo Creation and Conclusion

While a logo with many colours is beautiful on a screen, the cost of transferring it to a stationery can be very high. It may also not look that good. For this reason, it’s better that your logo have only a maximum of three colours, unless you really think it’s important that your logo have more than three colours.

Logo design is serious business, so be prepared to pay the logo designer in the thousands. Fortunately, spending that much is not necessary, what with the many freelance designers you can find online. But make sure to hire someone who is familiar with the kind of business you run. Professionals with such knowledge know how your logo SHOULD look like.

As the owner of a small business, it’s your job to become a Jack of all trades in your company. Unfortunately, by doing everything at once, it makes it much easier to make avoidable mistakes.

The worst part is these avoidable mistakes can threaten the long-term health of your otherwise thriving business. So it’s vital to know common mistakes that small business owners tend to make so that you can avoid them in the future.

How Clear Is Your Purpose?

If you ever intend to achieve lasting success in your business, you need to clearly define your purpose and strive to achieve what you set out to do.

As a small business owner, it’s your job to spend time developing a vision, a mission, and ultimately a purpose for your organization.

It really doesn’t even matter what type of business you start. It can be a dry cleaner, a restaurant, a delivery service, or anything else for that matter.

Ultimately, you need to understand your mission. You need to discover why your company exists and why people would want to purchase your products and services.

At the end of the day, once you’ve discovered your purpose, you’ll find it easier than ever to determine which direction your business should go. So having a purpose and knowing what it is is certainly a step in the right direction.

Choosing the Perfect Name for Your Business

To some people, this might seem like a superficial mistake on the surface. But when it comes to branding, marketing, and attracting people to your company, picking the perfect name is absolutely crucial to your success.

As an example, let’s say you plan to open an auto body shop. But unlike all the other auto body shops in the neighborhood, you plan to guarantee your work will be complete in a specific amount of time.

With that said, it would make sense to come up with a name for your business in alignment with this goal.

You wouldn’t want to call yourself Turtle Auto Body Repair or Slowpoke Body Shop!

On the contrary, you’d want to call yourself Speedy Body Shop or something similar.

So never discount choosing your name. It really is that important.

According to SecStates.com, nationwide and Georgia business entity search website, “Find information on any corporation or business entity in the United States by performing a search on the Secretary of State website of the state or territory where the corporation is registered.”

So, if you feel like you’ve come up with the perfect name for your business, check with your local Secretary of State to find out if the name is still available.

It’s possible that somebody else is already using it, so you may have to come up with another name.

Starting Your Business without a Budget

When you first start a small business, money is often very tight in the beginning. This is true unless you already have achieved business success in other areas and you have nearly unlimited capital to spare.

For most new small businesses, it’s often imperative to operate within a strict budget.

This is where problems typically arise.

Most small business owners fail to create a budget in the beginning. And they accidentally overspend in certain areas that will immediately leave them fighting to stay afloat.

Sure, you’re going to incur expenses when you first start a business. That’s all part of the risk and reward process. You should avoid spending needlessly and never purchase things that aren’t within your budget.

Conclusion

It’s definitely challenging to run a successful small business. So create your mission statement, make budgeting a top priority, and choose the perfect name for your business.

If you can accomplish these things, achieving startup success will become a little bit easier.

Tropical beaches, islands galore, lush jungles, a cheap cost of living all topped off with a delicious cuisine – who wouldn’t want to expand their business into Thailand? As a ‘farang’ or foreigner, however, this does come with some hurdles. There are many attractive incentives to expanding into the former Tiger Economy of Thailand, good infrastructure, cheap start-up costs for new businesses and close proximity to other Asian markets. On the other hand, things like language and cultural differences may be barriers to entry.

Here are some tricks of the trade to help you successfully expand your business into the Land of Smiles.

Have a Great Business Plan

As with any business venture or expansion, a great business plan is vital. It’s considered the key to success. Your business plan should outline what you’re trying to achieve, how you’re going to achieve it and when you’ll achieve it by. Your business plan should plan for every facet of your Thailand expansion goals.

Devise a Market Entry Strategy

A market entry strategy is basically concerned with your customers and competition. You should do extensive market research on the Thailand market and analyse your competitors. You should find out everything you can about who your customers and your competitors are. When you have a clear-cut idea of your customers and competitors, you can start devising all of you marketing and branding strategies.

Decide How You Will Register Your Business

There are a couple of different options when it comes to company registration. The options include registering as a Public Limited Company, Private Limited Company, Branch Offices of a Parent Company, representative offices, licensing or franchising in Thailand.

In Thailand a PLC (Private Limited Company) is the most popular form of company for businesses. This is probably because a PLC can be 100% foreign owned (except in some special industries reserved for Thai nationals) and investor liability is limited to the amount of investment. You need three promoters to register a PLC. Each promoter must be over 20 years old, be available to sign any documents and all must hold at least one share in the company. Once the registration is complete, the promoter may sell any stock they have. Company registration costs 500 Baht per 100,000 Baht of registered capital, the minimum being 5,000 Baht and the maximum 250,000 Baht. A Memorandum of Association must also be drawn up.

Consider All the Factors

There are a lot of factors to consider when expanding into another country and Thailand is no different. Have you wondered about the average time it takes to set up a business in Thailand? Immigration procedures? How about the average cost of renting office space in Thailand? You can click here to see how much Servcorp’s virtual office spaces can cost http://www.servcorp.co.th/th/virtual-offices/ as an example. There are also all the administrative things like opening bank accounts, hiring staff, Thai labour laws and taxation and social security systems in Thailand to consider. As well as all of these factors, there are linguistic and cultural issues to consider. You’ll need to hire people who can speak with you in English and also with your customer base in Thai. Will you need to pay bilingual staff a higher rate than usual?

Don’t Go It Alone!

As with any expansion, you can’t do it all alone. You’ll have to run your domestic business too after all. You need to have a dedicated, reliable team of staff both local Thai people and staff familiar with your own culture your existing business practices to get your new branch up and running. If you put the time and effort into the planning, research and execution of your Thai expansion, then there’s no reason why you can’t succeed.

 

The logistics industry deals with storing and transporting products from other businesses, delivered from different parts of the world. Firms can specialise in moving the products within a country, or they can choose to focus on importing and exporting goods. Transporting these products can be from the sea, by air, or on land.

Obviously, starting a logistics firm is more than just a forklift rental and a large space to store the goods, it is about knowing the industry and making relevant connections. If you are planning to start your own logistics company, you will need a little more elbow grease. Here we list down ways in which you can begin operating a logistics firm.

Know more about the industry by getting experience in it

In an industry such as this, the best way to get experience is by working in logistics. This will help you have first-hand experience on what the job entails, more than just what you know in theory and in what you have learned from other people. You will get to know the ins and outs of the business; but more importantly, you can get acquainted and connected with the people who can help you start your business.

Make relevant connections and use them

Once you have made your connections, do not be shy about using them. Remember that some of the businesses that are thriving today have started with a network of connections. If you know someone who is in the export industry in a certain region, go and plan a business with that region as a focus.

Get funding

Of course, you will not be able to start a business without a capital first. Create a solid business plan and convince investors that your firm will make a profit. Make sure to mention your plans, projects, and the connections you have made to make your business more viable.

Have the proper equipment

You are a logistics firm only by paper if you do not have the proper equipment. You will need equipment that can deal with heavy lifting like forklifts, which are navigable in any setting and can lift heavy goods from a crate that just docked. You will need vehicles to move these goods from the dock to the storage facility like cars, ships, planes, and whatnot.

Obtain a license

To make it official, make sure to get your firm legal. Prepare the proper documentation and secure a license to transport locally or overseas.

A logistics business is obviously not a very affordable business, but it is lucrative. In a time when the world is getting connected not just through technology but also through the goods that we share, logistics firms have become an important part of that relationship.

You have just launched a startup and now you definitely need to get your brand in front of as many eyes as it is possible. The problem here is you are not just competing in the industry, but you are competing with all the millions of other marketing messages that your potential consumers are bombarded with every day. As a rule, young startups on top of everything do not have much funding for digital marketing. So what can you do here? Fortunately, there are eight affordable (and invaluable) digital marketing tips provided by professionals in digital media services in Toronto that will help you promote your startup.

First of all, let’s talk social

The first thing you need to remember is that social media today is one of the best and most cost effective ways to actually market your startup. It can provide you with a platform for growing your brand, as well as offering an easy medium for customer service and promotion opportunities.

1. Be frequent and consistent: Social media is always a great way for you to build your brand’s voice. You need not only to regularly post there something but in fact to create a uniformed identity of your posts. In addition, do not over post or deviate from your actual brand’s message. Remember to buffer App reports and that best number of posts to social web-sites like Facebook is somewhere between five and 10 times a week, for Twitter it is five tweets every day and for Google+ or LinkedIn it is only one time a day.
2. It is not about you, it is all about your customer: Using social networks only for promotional purposes is an absolutely failed strategy, because it provides your followers no value. On the contrary, you need to find and share information that can be useful and interesting to your customers and only occasionally mix in some of your promoted content.
3. Engage with your followers: Social media is an undoubtedly great way for your startup to begin interacting with current and potential customers. You should leverage your followers and try to make them feel like very valuable members of your brand. You should not be afraid of any social confrontation, approach every complaint on your product or service as an opportunity to show how great your brand’s customer-service capabilities are.
4. Try small investments into the platforms:

You know that today thereis a great number of different social opportunities which you can invest in. According to experts from Toronto SEO company who conducted a research on platforms the best options for small investments are as follows:

Pay-to-play Service on Facebook: Facebook is fast and steadily becoming a pay-to-play platform for many startups, and if you really want to see any engagement you will have to invest some money into promoting your Facebook posts.

Sponsored tweets: With no doubt, Twitter today still manages to provide a pretty good amount of organic engagement, but this micro blogging platform also has some paid solutions for various businesses, with one being sponsored tweet. If you get a sponsored tweet, you are very likely to reach higher engagement with followers (and others).