Category: Starting Up

You finally made a decision. You’ve decided to be your own boss. And the more you think about it, the better you feel. It’s a big decision. It’s one you’ve weighed carefully. However, at the end of the day, it was your frustration that pushed you over the edge. Perhaps, it’s because you just got fed up working for a boss on a mission to create chaos out of order and working with mean-spirited people who say nasty things about you behind your back. Or perhaps, it’s because you’ve been downsized from a corporate job where you thought you had made yourself indispensable. As a result, you’ve realized that rather than providing security, a job can be pulled out from your feet at any time for any reason.

Decide What to Do Next

If you’re thinking of quitting your job because you have a better idea on how to do things in your line of work, then more power to you. However, what if you have not developed enough know-how to launch your own business or have no idea what kind of business you want to own? In this case, you might just want to look into franchising a lucrative business. UPS, for example, has a proven business model and an effective marketing process. Why not look into getting a UPS franchise store?

Aren’t Franchises Risky?

Here’s the thing about franchising: if you go about it the wrong way, you could lose your shirt. There are some frightening statistics about people who have jumped in and not done half as well as they had expected. On the other hand, there are others who have made more in a month from their franchises than they made in a whole year working as a cog in a corporate wheel.

Asking whether franchises are risky leads to a paradox because the answer could be either “yes” or “no” with both answering being perfectly valid. Franchises can be risky if you pick the wrong one, if you’re the wrong person for the job, or if you go about doing things the wrong way. Conversely, franchises are not risky if you pick a high-demand niche, choose to do work that you love, and go about doing all the right things.

A better question might be: How can I go about doing the right things to become successful at franchising.

How to Do the Right Things

If you’re single and without any family obligations, then it’s fine if you just go ahead and do what you like. However, chances are that you’re married and that your decision to be your own boss is going to affect everyone around you. As a result, you’ll not only be struggling to build your business, but you’ll also have to contend with a hostile family, too.

You may be fortunate enough to have fully supportive family members who are always pleased to see you do what makes you happy; in that case, you’re good to go.

What’s more likely to happen, however, is that not everybody is as enthusiastic about your planned adventure into unknown waters.

Here are three possible scenarios:

• 1. You capitulate to their demands that forget “your crazy idea” and stick with doing work you hate.
• 2. You compromise and promise not to quit your job until you’ve built a business on the side that will replace your current income.
• 3. You convince them that you’ll do your due diligence and find a business that is bound to work with the right amount of sweat equity.

Out of these scenarios, only the third is likely to work. While the second one may sound reasonable enough, it’s difficult to build a business on the side because there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Like a baby bird, you may just have to jump out of your nest to find your wings.

While you can certainly decide to carry on regardless of what your family thinks, you’re going to have to put up with silent hostility. Ideally, you should get your family to emotionally support your initiative. It will make a world of difference.

Assuming you’ve won the support of your home team, then the next step is to figure out your financial situation. If it’s not where you want it to be, figure out how you can create enough cash flow to make it through the early phase of your new business.

Next, do your homework. Really look for a franchise that satisfies two things. The first is that it’s a solid business model with an excellent track record for helping franchisees become successful. The second is that it is in a niche that you enjoy and that you have some knowledge or experience with. For instance, if it is a restaurant franchise, then it really helps to have had some experience in the hospitality industry because you’ll have a better idea how to manage employees and meet with customer expectations.

Finally, once you’ve picked your franchise, raised the funds to get in, put all your time and effort to learning everything you can, then it’s time to take massive action.

It can be a risk to quit your job and become your own boss, but if you do enough of the right things for long enough, the rewards are there for the taking.

Article Contributed by Sean Blanks, Marketing Manager, cartridgesave.co.uk 

In today’s world of never-ending choice, a disappointed customer is one that’s lost forever. This is because if you deliver a bad experience, the infinite options on offer means the customer can find an alternative by just scrolling down Google. It’s therefore imperative that you work to ensure your offering and your customer experience is better than the competition’s.

It’s no longer simply a case of offering best price, because everyone is trying to do that. Through a quick online search, customers are able to price-match even when they are away from the desktop.

Instead customers also require a flawless back-end service enabling them to order next day and return goods free of charge; where customer service is available across a number of platforms; and they can access offers and services personalised to them.

So what do you need to do in 2016 to stand out from the competition?

Innovate

Over the past ten years Burberry has experienced a huge transformation, positioning themselves as the height of luxury-chic by working tirelessly to engage a new, young customer base. They’ve engaged them by giving them a digital experience that Generation Y appreciate, identify with and place the brand in a relevant light to them.

Their flagship store in London is a great example. Here they blur the brand’s off and online presence. For example, shoppers can pick up an item of clothing and be presented with a video of it brought to life on the arm of a supermodel, just as they would if they were browsing online. This fun element makes the shop a must visit, which encourages shoppers to step inside. Once inside, they are one step closer to purchasing.

Conversely, in the digital space, they offer their brand followers the same VIP treatment as their real world celebrities. They were the first to broadcast their catwalks live on social media, so that fans at home could have democratic access to the content normally reserved for the A list.

By looking for innovative means to market to a demographic who had previously been untapped, Burberry has become one of the highest profile brands on social media. When you think that awareness and consideration are key factors driving customers to invest, Burberry have been extremely savvy. The more people are talking about them and encouraged to step into a store, the more people are likely to buy.

At cartridgesave.co.uk one of our key targets is schools. Although they represent a small proportion of our customer base, we were keen to grow it. So we used PR to engage by offering schools added-value. In 2015 we launched a competition called Write Christmas, offering students a chance to win £1,000 for their schools by penning a festive story. The competition gave us reason to speak to schools without leading with a sales message. Instead we ‘gifted’ them with the chance to win, alongside top tips of how to make this a part of their national curriculum teaching. The results were fantastic. We received thousands of entries, including data we could use for future marketing. And crucially, the happy, and desired byproduct, of this engagement campaign was the growth of our school accounts.

Real world and online working as one

A few years ago experts were heralding the end of the high street. Today it’s very much still a British institution and the retailers that are thriving are those who have diversified their offering to merge their real world and online space. Argos is a great case-in-point. Its adoption of click and collect has resulted in the brand becoming the first to register £1m in mobile sales. Customers can conveniently order online and pick up the parcel in store, bypassing the frustrating element of online shopping where you have to wait in for a parcel.

If you have a physical shop, it’s really important that you can offer the same things instore and online, and vis versa. It’s also important to identify what the customer wants. Do they want you opening at 9am or would it be better to operate later opening hours, if that’s when demand for your stock is at a premium both on and offline?

Humanise the anonymous world of online

Use data to identify what customers buy and browse, plus what they like, where they live and what life stage they are in. Rather than this being ‘big brother’ it means you can target customers with offers and promotions that are relevant than them.

For example we use Facebook advertising to target specific demographics. We pull data from site visits to try and engage customers who have been online in the last 30 days with reminders that we offer free delivery on orders of any size. So that we remind them of a difference that gives them reason to order that little thing on their list, no matter how small. We also use Facebook to promote our business accounts, just to the business community. Which means our feed is not full of content irrelevant to our social community; but at the same time we are able to reach office managers and operation managers with valuable information on our 30 days credit, 0% interest, no contract offering.

Add personality

Shoppers are now motivated by personality. They want to purchase from brands that represent them and are more willing to pay if the brand is ‘like me’.

Innocent is a great example of a company that has embraced this soft benefit. Their personality-driven marketing offers humour and a sense of British irrelevance that makes consumers forget that they are owned by Coca Cola. Instead, shoppers buy into the wholesome image and the fact that they are very vocal about donating to charity.

Empower employees

Make sure that your customer facing staff offer the same experience whether they are visiting in store, calling to complain or enquiring via social media. Customers demand a consistency good experience and the person answering a tweet must be as knowldegable and care as much as the customer service manager dealing with high value complaints.

To empower your employees, ensure they have the opportunity to be immersed in your company values; are given sufficient training; and have the authority to make decisions, for example offer refunds for faulty goods without holding up the process while they “wait for a manager to authorise”.

When starting a new business, the list of different factors you have to consider seems to be everlasting. In this article we’ve outlined some of the key things we think you should consider when at the beginning stages of setting up a new organisation:

• New Office Premises
• Product Offering
• Social Media / Marketing
• Training & Employees

Lets start at the top of the list, the premise of the office. Location is key no matter what industry you’re working within. Obviously if you’re a fashion retailer, you could say that you need to be in a busy location where your customers are guaranteed to see you. But this strikes just as important if you’re a business/marketing agency, where the need to be in a location where your clients can travel to you is also an essential.

Next up, your products. What do you have to offer? We’re currently working in extremely competitive times where the need to set yourself apart from your competitors is almost obvious. Different factors will play to this, and when it comes down to it, the success of your products could be down to the employees you have, or the convenience to a client/customer because of your location.

Social media is huge and it’s only going to get bigger and bigger. Again, a number of different factors will add to how successful you’re online, but it all starts with needing to have an online presence. It’s somewhere your customers can find you, interact with you and be inspired. But more importantly for new businesses, it’s the place in which your customers will find you. Start with the basics, set up your accounts and start following the relevant influencers before moving onto things such as advertising and building follower counts. If this is all completely new to you, why not do a course? You’ll build your knowledge and there’ll touch on the basics, as well as more in-depth things.

It’s important to not only consider the types of employees you’re wanting for your organisation, but also how qualified you want them to be, and whether you want to train your staff up separately yourself, or send them on external training courses. If you’re hiring for niche roles, such as IT or marketing execs, it’s clear that when starting out, you want a strong team around you to support you. However, if the costs of hiring experts puts you off, then consider entry to mid level jobs and train them up. If it’s marketing execs, why not hire a graduate and send them on a CIM course? If it’s IT, then have a browse on LinkedIn and consider a course by Global Knowledge Network, where your employees will learn important skills to secure your networks. It may seem complicated, but sending one of your IT employees on something like this can have huge benefits for your organisation, as well as take the weight off you.

Starting a business from scratch is incredibly difficult. The stuff of childhood dreams, running a business can quickly turn into a nightmare if you’re not careful. However, should you require it, help is always at hand. Using experts to advise you and inform your decisions may seem expensive, but it can actually save you money in the long term. Here’s who you should consult when starting your business and why their expert advice is invaluable.

Accountants: Get Your Finances in Order

Unless you’ve run a business previously or spent some time self-employed, it’s likely that you’ve never filed a tax return before. Understanding how taxes and expenses work is vital for business owners. This is because, if you get it wrong, you could be hit with a huge fine or end up paying far more money than you need to.

When sorting out your tax returns and getting your expenses in order, you’ll want an expert in your sector. Find an expert that will be able to fulfil your business’s needs and you could be able to save a small fortune. As well as this, you’ll have peace of mind that your tax returns are correct and you can get on with running your experts.

Logistics: Ensure Your Stock Arrives

If your business can’t receive stock in its warehouse or send stock to customers on time, then it’s doomed to fail. In 21 st century business, customer service is the cornerstone of any successful business. This is now truer than ever, especially due to the rise of review sites like Feefo and TripAdvisor.

As such, getting the logistics right is vital. Any delay to the sending of packages and parcels can cause complaints and negativity towards your business. Employing the right logistics partner will mean you’ll be spreading the good word, not the bad.

Web Development: Get the Right Team

Finally, consider your online presence. Unless you know how to code, use HTML and web servers, you may struggle to build a site. Luckily, you can hire a freelance expert through great sites like People Per Hour. This way, you can have a site built quickly by an expert, but won’t have to keep someone on the permanent payroll. Having a website can never be a bad thing, and a fully functioning website can hugely boost the exposure of your business.

Of course, there are even more areas than this where you can employ expert help, and these are just three. However, as this post has hopefully demonstrated, although experts can sometimes be costly, they’re worth their weight in gold.

Article Contributed by Simon Dell

In late 2014, I set out on the startup life with four business partners, building a retail promotion app driven by beacon technology, which included a proprietary solution for security tags instore . The challenge was harder because I was still running my marketing agency ­ TwoCents at the same time as managing director, and every investor or experienced entrepreneur you ever speak to, tells you that you can’t (successfully) do two things at once.

Whether you disagree with that supposition or not, being involved with an established business versus a brand new business has delivered some lessons that I would have initially thought I was too ‘mature’ a business owner to need to learn.

These are three of those lessons.

Ambiguous Goals

Many start­ups talk about ‘pivoting’ ­ the moment where you set off on a slightly different direction than you originally intended when a new opportunity presents itself. And whilst this is a realistic part of the life of a start­up, this doesn’t negate the need for strong and realistic goals for the business.

We were hindered with ambiguous business goals at the start, based on equal ambiguity of resources available. But what should have happened was for the business to set simple step­by­step goals that were easy to achieve. This would have meant more work and almost micromanagement of the process, but would have avoided problems further down the line.

Wrong Platforms

Our startup is based on a iPhone and Android app and a web­based platform that retailers can access to upload special promotions and deals. An early mistake was not enough research into the right platforms on which to build our technology.

We initially targeted a cross­platform tool called Xamarin but it was in too early stage of development and after months of work, meant we had to go back to the drawing board and start again. That cost time and money and had we spent a little longer looking at platforms we would have seen some of the early teething problems Xamarin had, would have meant it wasn’t the platform for us.

Spending Too Quickly

Despite my experience in running a company, it’s easy to get caught up in spending to solve problems quicker. Decisions got rushed and so did spending. It’s vital to plan for the long­term? if you think your business will be looking for capital raising in twelves months time, or will be starting to generate revenue then, then see if you can make your money last eighteen months. If you leave it too tight, you’ll find yourself struggling to pay staff and with a business that’s about to collapse. Fix a per month budget that works for the entire business and then with additional expenditure, make sure you have it planned into a detailed cash­flow projection.

The early mistakes we made have been fixed and whilst we’re still in a cautious and nervous part of our growth, those mistakes have actually helped shape strategy moving forward.

The learnings have also shaped how I move forward with the more established agency business, creating a need to focus on recurring revenue rather than projects, something I had known for years, but had never faced up to.

About the Author

Originally hailing from London and moving to Brisbane in 2003, Simon Dell has been the director and owner of TwoCents since it launched in September 2009. His background is in the alcohol industry and has included time working for both Heineken Australia, Coors UK and Lion Nathan. His role within TwoCents is to help develop and implement strategic and creative marketing plans for clients, support Art Direction, as well as training companies and speaking around Australia on social media, branding and marketing.