When you become an entrepreneur you often gravitate towards the DIY lifestyle. Often the result of limited finances, you decide to wear all the hats until your operation starts producing profits. Though this can work in some cases with some responsibilities, there are certain areas of business that unless you’re already skilled in, should be outsourced to a professional. Taking on too much, particularly in areas like marketing and accounting, could end up costing you more than you bargained for.
Why You Need to Consult Experts
Though it can seem cost-effective to keep doing these major tasks on your own, you’ll soon learn that it’s not. Because both of these areas of business are complex and ever-changing, the ability to learn every trend, rule, or regulation to remain in compliance and in the competitive market can prove difficult for the average business owner. Eventually, time is wasted, errors occur, money goes down the drain and your startup remains to stagnate. Consulting the experts on an as needed or ongoing basis makes a world of difference.
Compliance
Here’s one factor that should be a top priority for all entrepreneurs – compliance. In order to maintain a successful business, you must remain in compliance with rules and regulations. This is especially true in matters of accounting. When company funds are not properly recorded and reported each year (sometimes sooner depending on profits), your business could face tax penalties and fines. You want to consult a financial professional near you as they’d be most familiar with laws in your state. If you were working from Missouri, for example, you’d want to find a Quickbooks accounting CPA St Louis community business leaders have vetted and deemed trustworthy. A good CPA will help you get set up and ensure you remain out of trouble with the government.
Experience and Education
Unless you’ve gone to school and received adequate education and training in the fields of marketing and accounting, to complete these jobs on your own only hurts your business. Both fields require a great deal of education and experience to master as the process of accounting and trends in marketing are constantly changing. When you lack the necessary education or experience, you stand to make mistakes as well as miss out on opportunities to advance your business forward.
Time
What many entrepreneurs don’t know is that both marketing and accounting are ongoing responsibilities. You can’t create an Excel spreadsheet or set up a free QuickBooks account and never enter information into the system or not work from a budget and expect your company to do well. Just like you can’t build a website and never make updates or create content without using SEO techniques and expect it to go viral. You’ll have to dedicate time and energy to these things daily and this ultimately takes time away from other areas of your business that you could have been dealing with (in which you are trained and educated to do so).
Growth
There are very few successful brands that got to where they are today without the help of some other business professional or service provider. From making effective purchase decisions based on financial forecasts and planning for expansions to increasing online presence and attracting your target audience to increase sales potential, ensuring a business can grow successfully requires skill and experience beyond your own understanding. Accountants ensure that you are properly managing the funds to get you to your goals faster while marketers help to build your brand and get you in front of as many prospective customers as possible to boost your business. Which essentially makes them crucial keys in reaching new levels of success.
There are a lot of reasons that entrepreneurs shy away from consulting the likes of accountants and marketers for their small businesses. From not having enough money to believing they can tackle the job themselves, these reasons end up leaving them in a lot of financial trouble and ions behind the competition. Service providers like CPAs and marketers have the education and experience to save your business time and money while helping to build a solid brand.
