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new business opening

5 Tips for the Aspiring or New Business Owner

Setting up and running your own business can be one of the most exhilarating experiences and yet also many will agree one of the most stressful. You will experience major highs to major lows every week, but it’s important to stay positive.

So take a look at a few our tips and let us, and others, know if you have any of your own…

Focus on solving a problem, not just what you like to do.

It’s often preached that to be successful you have to really love what you do. This is more than a fair point. If you are truly passionate about what you do every day then you’re bound to work harder, because it is something you absolutely love and look forward to getting up for every single day.

However, this is by no means the key to a business’s success, and often it can be a contributing factor in the failure of a business. Too often new business owners, or entrepreneurs, focus solely on what they like and what they enjoy best in their business, rather than focusing on solving a problem or even developing the original idea to create the very best product that customers will want.

Idea: Take a look at many of the failed presentations on the TV show Dragon’s Den, where the aspiring business owner loves their idea, but the Dragon’s tear it to shreds as the owner has failed to show a market or profit for their product or idea.

Make sure you don’t get caught up in how passionate you are about an idea, mistaking how much other people may be passionate about it and how much real success it can have.

Custom Business Cards
Don’t forget traditional marketing items like Business Cards

Don’t forget the traditional marketing methods

With the birth of the internet and the spectacle which is the ever growing social networks like Facebook and Twitter it is very easy to get caught up in the idea that online marketing is the only place to spend your money. This is far from the truth! The more traditional marketing methods like business cards, banners, radio and your local directories are some of the strongest areas, and in today’s digitalised social media frenzied age also  some of the most respected now, for reaching and securing your target market.

Of course we’re not saying that you entirely ignore the twitter and Google + accounts. There are strong connections to be made there and they can be great for managing customer service or simple enquiries, but it’s too simple to side-line traditional marketing methods for Google Ads and it’s important to find the right mixture for your business.

Learn from your mistakes

It goes without saying that every new business owner will make mistakes. You’re working on a tight budget, and will inevitably want to protect your idea. You’ll also come across hundreds of issues during your business launch most of which you wouldn’t have thought of beforehand. It’s important that you learn from these problems, redeem the errors and make the failure just a mere measure of your strength and success by putting into practice what you’ve learnt.

Tip: Never put your head in the sand hoping nobody notices your mistakes, be open, truthful and you’re far more likely to succeed.

Complaints are money waiting to be made

They say that a customer who has had a good experience with a business will, on average tell one person, but someone who has had a bad experience will tell seven. Although this sounds extremely negative, it becomes immediately more positive when you learn that a customer who originally had a bad experience will tell more people about how good your service is, if you redeem your mistake and transform their experience into a positive one.

It’s important to remember that everybody wants to feel important and at the same time everyone wants to feel like they got a good deal. If you go out of your way to make a customer feel cared for and give them an extra special deal, they are far more likely to tell people about how good your eventual service was, rather than focus on the original bad service and experience. Complaints are also a great opportunity for you learn what can make your business better.

Tip: Have you’re ear to ground, please disgruntled customers and learn from what your customers are saying.

Get ready for the weight of responsibility

If it hasn’t fully dawned on you already, let me reiterate that you are about to take on a massive responsibility. Not just to yourself, your family and social life. But when that opening day comes around, you’ll find yourself leading a staff meeting and suddenly you’ll find 10 faces looking back you; all of them willing to give you, and your business venture, a chance and stake their livelihoods to depend on the success or failure of your business. It may make you feel like running a mile…

Tip: Embrace the challenge and you will go from strength to strength.