Building a company from the ground up takes a lot of patience and the ability to absorb information from across a broad spectrum. You are going to want to grow your business as much as possible, but you must be confident that you are operating within your means. And these are the two areas of setting your company up that we are going to look at; how to keep costs down and grow your business.
Operating Costs
There are areas of a business that require a constant flow of investment and others that can be revisited on an ad-hoc, quarterly, or even annual basis. It is important for your future success as a business owner that you are able to differentiate between these areas. To start with you should look at the parts of your business that are essential to the production of your product or services. These are the things that you need to fund and should be budgeted for before anything else such as utility bills. But these will often depend on what kind of company you are running; an agriculture based firm will need to invest in equipment, land, and things like red diesel for their machinery to ensure everything runs smoothly.
One of the costs that can cause a business a lot of headache is staffing. Knowing the exact number of employees you need is a skill that should not be underestimated. You will need to strike a balance between hiring people that are necessary to develop business, but not so many that you are making a loss on wages which could lead to layoffs. Quite often a sign of a company trying to run before it can walk is the hiring of too many people, so take it easy and add only to areas that are in need.
Marketing
To grow your company you are going to need to promote your business. The problem with marketing, especially after discussing operating costs, is that it can be expensive. This is a good example of where a business owner is supposed to have a broad range of knowledge without an expertise. With that in mind, here are two types of promotion that you might want to consider and their financial implications.
- SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a valuable tool for any company that has a web presence – which in this day and age is every business. SEO is the name given to the process of making your website have greater visibility in the organic results of a search engine. The reason this is important is that over 90% of users don’t look beyond the first page of a search engine’s results and therefore if you can’t feature high among results then you are losing potential traffic and custom. SEO can be done in-house and so should be relatively cheap to operate, and is an essential in modern marketing.
- Social Media
Social media is at the fingertips of everyone these days thanks to smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Every topic, company, and industry has a hashtag and that is a vital way of getting eyes on your product. By engaging with the social media trends surrounding the area of business you operate in, you will encourage users to come to your social media page and beyond. There are ways of paying for great social media visibility, but you should start off by using the free accounts and learning the practice of good social media marketing. Hashtags, high-quality content, and engaging with people is the way forward.
