Don’t start-up your new business underfunded

One topic that I would consider ourselves experts on is launching start-up businesses. Over the past 7 years of being in business, we have dealt with nearly 2000 businesses, many of which have been startups. One common lesson that we have learned throughout our time is that the ones that are still in business years later are the ones that put more time, thought and money into their venture on Day 1 rather than investing slowly as time went on. I think this is because of the following reasons.

1. Investing more money from the outset creates a “winning” attitude – it signifies more belief in the business idea and gives the owner more incentive to make it work quickly.

2. Businesses that invest more initially tend to start off with thinking about how the new venture will be perceived, in our dealings with these businesses this falls into the category of brand identity where we create professional looking logos, websites, stationery for a business so they look like they are established right from day one.

3. The other main reason that they survive is that they don’t live hand-to-mouth necessarily and this frees up the business owner to concentrate on the key early business tasks without the financial worry that that business has to from day 1 immediately start funding wages and other costs as that would be budgeted for a certain period of time.

This is not to say that businesses that start on a budget don’t do well, as we have good case studies of businesses where they have started off as a hobby, side project from an existing job and this has grown to take over their life, however 9 times out of 10, this is not the case.

One of our key tips to our customers who come in to see us with the idea of starting a new business is to concentrate their full efforts on it. One of the most difficult things to do sometimes is to let go of the security net of the full time job to start a new venture, because in our experience (we, ourselves set up this same way), it creates the need to succeed as the knowledge that there is no one else that will keep paying the bills has gone.  If there is no full time commitment it is very hard for businesses to really push it to where it has to be without spending a lot more money on professional help to do this for them.

If you are thinking about starting a new business, then feel free to talk to SO Marketing today for some free advice before you begin. Call us today on 01538 750 538 or visit www.somarketing.com