The world of business can punish failure very harshly, particularly if you’re managing a small start-up. Businesses need to be able to adapt to changing circumstances with a certain speed and flexibility if they wish to stay afloat.
Small startups actually have the advantage over their larger and better established counterparts in this area, as smaller businesses are able to make changes more quickly and are not inhibited by the precedent of a ‘traditional’ way of doing business.
For small start-ups to be successful, they must recognise and exploit this advantage. If your start-up has run into trouble, follow these simple suggestions to help get your business back on track.
–Look back and access your action plan
Can you confidently point out what you have been able to achieve in the past six months. Are you on track or behind schedule. Take a look at the goals you set back last year. Which ones are already accomplished or near completion? Based on what’s not completed and how much time is left on your business calendar, put together a weekly or monthly action plan that will help you meet your business meet its goals by year’s end.
All your employees should be on the same page about what you want to achieve and when you have to achieve them. Don’t micromanage your employees but demand deliverables possibly on weekly basis.
–There’s No Shame in Downsizing
You may feel that your company is small enough already, but one of the most effective ways to cut costs and shift the financial balance back in favour of profitability, is to downsize. If you rent a commercial space or an office building, this will eat into your budget considerably.
Ask yourself whether your business really needs that space, when you could save money by allowing staff to work from home and keeping your inventory in a secure storage unit.
The wealth of technology available now means that staff don’t necessarily have to be in the same room as one another to keep in touch. You could downsize and move your office storage to another location to rent a smaller office to keep cost low. If you want to know how renting a storage unit could help your business, contact a specialist provider.
–Get in Touch with Your Customers
If your business isn’t making the profits needed to keep it on a secure financial footing, you need to consider whether you’re providing something that your customers actually want. Why should they buy from your business and not from your rivals?
This is a good time to get in touch with your customer base and ask them what they like about your business, and what they think you could improve on. There are plenty of traditional methods for contacting your existing clients, but social media now provides a free alternative that allows you to get in touch with your customers and converse with them in real time.
If your business hasn’t already built up a social media presence, now is the time to do so. It also provides a cheap way of marketing your products and building brand awareness with the opportunity to have giveaways and share news about the latest goods or servicing your business is offering.
There is real value in customer feedback if everything is not going as planned. Stop shouting about your product for once and start listening to your customers about their issues and problems when using your product.
What are you not doing right for them and what can be improved. What is your competitor doing better than you. Starting measuring the effectiveness of your strategies and stop doing what is not working and focus on what brings results.