Contributed post
When you have an entrepreneurial spirit, setting up your own business is quite possibly one of the most exciting things you can do. To get to be your own boss, calling all the shots and working towards your own goals are all truly liberating experiences but with this comes a huge responsibility.
While you might already have a brilliant idea, a clear target market and a pretty good idea of where you will be in 3 – 5 years time, there are a few things that you might not have considered yet such as security, streamlining and staff acquisition. Here’s what you need to know.
Business Security
Before you do anything, you should make arrangements for your business security in terms of both your physical premises and your digital assets. The right software can make a huge difference to how you operate and it is important that you and your employees are able to access everything you need without risking theft or exposure to malware.
Your premises should also be secure. While you might like to work from home to start with, as soon as you get office space or retail space, you must ensure that you select keyholders carefully and lock any sensitive information away at the end of every day.
Streamlining and Efficiency
Though you might have a solid business plan, you should always be looking for ways to streamline your business processes. Looking at your value stream and creating a map is by far the easiest way to analyse where you might be able to improve your efficiency or tweak processes to be more customer friendly.
Over the lifetime of your business, you should always be looking for new ways to make business easier but this doesn’t mean you can’t start now. By all means set your business up and start trading as soon as possible but don’t be surprised if you decide to change things radically a few months in! Fixing potential problems early is always the best way to ensure a happy future for you and your team.
Staff Acquisition
Hiring staff is part of growing a business and if you have never been on a hiring committee before, you will probably need a bit of advice to get you started. Using a recruitment agency might be a good way to find prospective candidates and discuss what you want from your staff. But, equally, going it alone with a brilliant job advert could bring in the people you want.
Though you might assume that you want to work with people like you, a diverse team is always the best way to go. Hiring a team with a mixture of backgrounds, experiences and education levels is a good way to ensure continued creativity and encourage new ideas.
Planning for the future of your business, even before you get started, is the best way to reach your goals. Being open-minded with new ideas and willing to change things early on could be the main thing that makes your business successful so don’t be afraid to give things a go!