The early days of starting a business are challenging ones. Once your business is more established, day to day you’ll be dealing with maintenance rather innovation: keeping the ship steady. The early days, though, are all about weathering crises, and finding the balance you need to grow your business and customer base, and achieve a measure of stability.
Today we’re taking a look at some of these challenges and finding a few solutions that might help you on your road to stability, growth and success!
Storage
If you’re running any kind of retail operation, especially if you sell online, rather through a physical storefront, one of your main concerns is warehouse space: storing your goods safely, accessible when you need them, and at a price that doesn’t eat into your profit margin.
When you’re starting out it doesn’t make sense to sign a long-term contract on your own warehouse: demand will likely rise and fall while you’re trying to find a stable customer base, and you’ll end up spending money on space you find yourself without the stock to use.
Look for local storage facilities: many will offer special rates for businesses with flexible terms that allow you to move to different storage bays at short notice. This means you can manage your needs as they arise and avoid overspending, and the storage company gets to nurture a new long-term customer. If you’re interested in London storage opportunities, click here for further details.
Marketing
Building a buzz around your business is another challenge it’s hard to surmount: with no reputation to trade off, it’s hard to generate some good publicity, and you have limited budget which is likely better spent on paying for premises, raw materials and staff.
Fortunately, there are some inventive ways to generate some publicity that will reflect well on your business without using too many resources you may need urgently to keep your business running.
Firstly, it’s worth looking at other local businesses and trying to build relationships with them. If you stop looking at other local small businesses as your competition and start looking at them as allies all sorts of possibilities become available. If you’re able to agree on a reciprocal referral scheme, you can effectively as much as double your audience, by pooling the footfall between your two businesses.
You could also look at representing your business at community events, like fairs, fetes and street parties, assuming, of course, your business is a suitable one. Running a stall or sponsoring an event begins to develop some name recognition that could turn into large and reliable audience for you.