If you are the kind of person who thinks you can just launch a business and start making money from day one, then you are in for a rude awakening.
We are here to tell you that running a profitable business in Australia is not easy. Indeed, up to 60% of start-ups fail within the first five years of being set up.
However, that should not deter you from pursuing your goals. Even in today’s climate, it is perfectly possible to launch and run a money making venture from scratch.
All you need to achieve this is a well-thought-out business plan, great organisational skills and a flexible approach.
With that in mind, here are 8 preparation tips to ensure small business success.
Follow them, and your new small business will soon become one of the 40% who does remain viable, sustainable, and prosperous.
1. Write a Business Plan
The cornerstone of most successful start-up businesses is a well-considered and put-together business plan.
This is a critical component for starting, developing, and stabilising your business as a force in the marketplace.
A good business plan outlines a roadmap to success. It also identifies both short-term and long-term milestones you should aim to achieve along the way.
The plan can also help you secure funding from banks or other financial institutions, as well identify potential opportunities or challenges, and generally make sound decisions.
There are several templates for business plans online that you can download. However, if it seems too daunting to write one on your own, you may want to hire the services of an expert to start yourself off on the right footing.
2. Be Organised
Many new business owners work a 10-hour day, which is plenty of time to be productive. But the key to achieving this is to be organised.
Good organisational skills are crucial to the success of any organisation. As it helps you to perform tasks critical to the business plan.
At the start of each week, compile a list of everything that needs to be done. This might include adding new products to your website, making sales calls, rearranging a shop display, organising your
social media or setting up advertising campaigns.
Be sure to then create separate to-do lists for each individual day you will be working and tick off each task once they have been completed.
Not only will this ensure you don’t forget to do anything you need to, but it will also demonstrate to you how productive you have been.
3. Automate your processes
Time is a precious commodity when you run your own small business, and with so much to do, you won’t have much of it spare.
For this reason, it is worth automating as many of your business processes as possible. This will ensure certain tasks – often the most mundane of them – get done automatically. It will also free you up to concentrate on other activities that are more profitable to your bottom line.
There is a range of automation tools out there that can be used to make your business processes much more efficient. This includes Buffer or Hootsuite for your social media platforms and Aweber or Mailchimp for email campaigns and newsletters.
You can also use Salesforce for sales, CRM or application development and Trello for task assignments and to-do lists.
4. Cashflow
Positive cash flow is crucial to the success of any business. Without it, you might find it harder to meet your financial obligations for the daily running costs of your operation. As well as paying taxes, your staff, stock and other overheads.
To give your cashflow a boost, it would be worth getting an EFTPOS Machine for your small business such as Smartpay.
One of the best things about this system is that it streamlines the payment process for your business. However, it also saves you from having to deposit cash into the bank, chase up unpaid invoices, or scroll through your bank statement to find EFT payments.
All of these can be very frustrating, time-consuming, and not the best use of your time as a resource.
5. Provide Great Service
Providing great customer service is crucial to the success of every organisation. Yet many businesses often lose sight of this.
At the end of the day, customers tend to be very loyal to companies that provide them with outstanding service. So, it is within your interest to ensure their experience with yours is nothing
short of world-class.
One way to provide this is to always reply to customer enquiries quickly. Another is to give them clear communication about the order process and the status of their order. It is also imperative you are courteous and professional in all correspondence with them too.
6. Be willing to learn
Even if you are the most seasoned of entrepreneurs, one of the key things you should always be doing is looking to improve your knowledge.
Business and the way people do business change all the time as new technologies are introduced and ways of thinking evolve.
It is important to recognise there are many things you do not know. Therefore you should be open to new approaches and different ideas on how to improve and grow your business.
Many resources, including podcasts, YouTube videos, social media accounts, networking, and books, can provide intel. So, it is worth investing the time to learn about new strategies.
7. Know what is and isn’t working
To be successful, something you will need to get a handle on is what is working for your business and what is not.
This can be hard to ascertain because sometimes you are too busy working in your business to work on your business.
Therefore you should set aside some time regularly to analyse each component of it. The more often you can do this, the better, and at the very least, it should be something you do at least once a year.
Some of the things you should evaluate are how effective the sales and marketing function is, what cost-saving opportunities can be made, and whether any processes can be streamlined.
It is also worth keeping an eye on your competition to ascertain what they are doing well and not so well. This will enable you to strengthen your overall business offer. While also giving you a competitive advantage.
8. Stay focused and consistent
Two of the key traits you will need to create a profitable business from scratch are to remain focused and be consistent.
Success rarely comes overnight, and it can take years for your venture to fully establish itself in the marketplace.
In the meantime, you should stay focused on the business plan and consistently conduct all the activities you identified as being critical to achieving your goal.
This does require quite a bit of patience too. But if you are tracking your progress and ticking off the targets as you meet them, you will be able to see how your business is developing and enhancing.
To keep yourself motivated and engaged, be sure to celebrate any win you have. Also, there is no harm in modifying your goals or workload to assist you in achieving more.
Conclusion
As you embark on your new venture, we hope you have found these eight preparation tips to ensure small business success very helpful.
At the end of the day, growing your company is not a race.
While you do have goals you want to achieve, it is important to recognise that all ventures grow at different rates.
In this respect, the old saying ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ rings true. Especially when trying to establish your commercial entity as a significant player within the marketplace.
However, should you stick to the business plan you originally drew up, and focus on delivering the critical success factors that are central to achieving it, your journey to profitability will take care of itself.
