When it comes to starting a business from the ground up, there’s no telling how much it’s going to cost you. Many of these expenditures are directed towards areas you may not consider when creating your brand.
Areas like furniture, rent, advertising, and advisors; it’s easy to write these off as small or even temporary outlays, but they can quickly eat into your bank account.
Here arefive tips for ways you can save money when you start your business:
Save money on furniture
It’s an irrelevant worry when you’re working out of your living room, but your business will quickly start to grow. You have to grow with your business, which, for most businesses, includes renting office space of some kind.
You’d be shocked at how expensive office furniture and stock can be – items like chairs, desks, filing cabinets, and copiers. Depending on how much you need, this could easily amount to a huge hit to your company expenditure.
This doesn’t mean you should avoid buying furniture altogether. It just requires thinking outside the box. Buying used furniture is a great way to save money, buy in bulk, and reduce your carbon footprint in one fell swoop. Read this awesome blog post on how to do office furniture solutions.
Become an expert in your business
Another way to save on your start-up costs is to become an expert in your own business.
Study every skill and practice that keeps your company alive from day-to-day. This usually includes accounting, sales, personnel management, and logistics. Learn the basic principles of these subjects – either from books, seminars, mentors or just by practicing every day.
You will eventually employ experts to manage all these areas, but right now, it’s all on you. Save money on expensive advisors and external services by training yourself. After becoming more accustomed to these skills, you may still decide to seek help, and this is a necessary part of growth, but you will be better equipped to decide what (or whom) is value for money and what isn’t.
If in doubt, downsize
Don’t feel pressured into employing expensive personnel or services if you don’t understand what you’re buying into. It’s all too easy to get carried away or panic that you can’t handle things with a small team (or even on your own). Before you decide to recruit, analyze every detail of your day-to-day routines and organization to see if you can find ways to increase productivity and solve the problem yourself. If you can’t, then by all means, recruit the necessary skills into your business, but by taking the time to pull apart your working processes, you’ll ensure you don’t waste money or leave productivity gains on the table.
Sales outrank marketing
If you had one day to save your company and the bank were knocking on your door, which would you focus your attention on? Yep, that’s right – sales.
Treat every business day as your last by directing resources towards increasing sales.
This could require you to hire a salesperson or copywriter or learn these crucial sales techniques yourself. Marketing will need to be addressed, but don’t be fooled by your competitor’s fancy ad campaigns. With great salesmanship, quality service, and a superior product, you’ll be ahead in no time.
Forget advertising, focus on customer service
Yes, advertising will be necessary to launch your brand into consumer consciousnesses, but you’d be surprised how much money you can waste in this area.
Focus more of your attention and resources on honing your product and making sure your customer service is superior to your competitors. By directing your attention to surprising each and every customer with the level of service, you’ll have repeat buyers in no time.
The best part of this method?
If you impress your customers enough, they’ll do your marketing for you. Word of mouth is infinitely more powerful than any marketing campaign – and it’s one hundred percent free.
