Creating your own business is both an exciting journey and a series of complex, often daunting tasks. A very important task for self-starters like yourself is to identify and act towards critical elements of your budding business. In doing so, you’ll likely have to carry out business decisions reserved for Human Resources (HR), Public Relations (PR), Marketing, and Accounting departments, among others. Here are a few suggestions on how to start off strong in your business startup.
Tip #1: Entrepreneurial Risk-Management
What are you ultimately aiming to achieve with your business? What are you prepared to risk to make that happen? These are two foundational decisions that you and everyone must make in your business startup plan. Maintaining long-term profitability of products could mean continuous investments and reinvestments into its production, distribution, and advertising. Running a new venture could mean operating at a loss for years, working exhausting long hours, and relying on relatively inexperienced employees to make sound decisions. As a fresh entrepreneur, you would be wise to prudently manage your risk. Determining what you are and are not willing to risk will lead to your professional and personal goals staying in sync.
Tip #2: Make a Viable Product, but Don’t Sluggishly Launch It
As a startup, it’s important for you to have some legitimately valuable and unique product to offer to others, a “minimum viable product.” This is a key marketing principle: failing to create such a product means failing to give your potential customers any reason to pick your product over any of your competitors. Another important point is to not delay your product on its introduction to the market. Initial customer feedback is very effective for gaining vital information on how to improve and perfect your product. The creation of a viable product that is launched in a timely manner should be very high on the list of priorities of your entrepreneurial efforts.
Tip #3: Rewarding Employees
Yet another critical aspect of your business startup is your HR compensation plan for your employees. Beyond base compensation, you must also consider the Benefits, Retirement, and Employee Reward and Recognition HR programs that will best support the organizational and performance goals that you are seeking for your business. Employees will underperform, feel underappreciated, and may even quit or retire early due to your poor HR compensation and reward strategies. It’s much wiser to devise a business strategy that compensates your employees competitively while also working towards your company’s goals and values.
Tip #4: Be Your Own Publicist
When you’re starting a new business, you’ll miss out on many opportunities by not putting your name and product out there in the world. Nowadays, there are tons of platforms to spread the message about what you’re bringing to the market, among them social media, websites relevant to the product you’re offering, community activities, and blog posts. Creating and effectively managing your business’ PR is a high-leverage move that will increase your products’ visibility, thus raising its likelihood of selling in more volume as times moves on.
Tip #5: Work Out a Financial Plan
Any viable business startup requires a detailed financial strategy. You will need to determine your projected financial earnings, startup costs, and your funding requests if you’re seeking out support from investors. Your financial projections will note what position and relative status you’re expecting to be in the somewhat near future. Your startup costs are materials or resources that you must have to get your business started and their associated costs. Your startup costs and financial projections can be used to convince investors and loan issuers to support your new business through their funding requests.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these 5 business tips on acting as your own HR, PR, Marketing and Accounting functions will greatly improve your capability at running your own business.
