Tips and tools for start-up success

Start-up owners have a lot to think about when setting up their business. From the original idea, to setting up the business properly, to how they can make get their first clients, how they can keep growing the business, and on to longer term plans such as staffing and expansion plans.
Luckily there are plenty of tools and supporting businesses that will help take some of that pressure off to let you focus on developing that brilliant idea that got you started in the first place. Here are a few of these tips and tools to help your start-up be successful and not one of the four in ten companies that don’t make it past five years statistics.

Get your message right

Getting the word out about what you do and how well you do it, regardless of what your business is, is probably the most critical element of success. Beyond your existing contacts and friends, who are an excellent place to start, you need to think about wider promotion. Nowadays it’s relatively easy – what you need is a professionally-designed website and the right way to tell your story. There are plenty of organisations that can help you do that – we do that, but there are a number of others too.

Get your message out there

Marketing and promotions are key to getting the message out there. Again, using your existing network is the obvious, and best, place to start. Remember that all your contacts will have their own networks, so while they may not have a direct use for your service or product, someone else in their network might.

So now that you’ve got your website right, the next step is to promote it.  Social media is an excellent and quick way to get bite-size information out into the wider community to drive traffic to your website and generate enquiries. Tools and sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are fantastic ways to network and promote your business.

Local search is another way of making it easy for clients to find you. While the days of heavy tomes of Yellow Pages lying around are long gone, a few clicks online is the way to do it. Local searches will keep your website high up on the search engine listings and offer you a way of targeting clients local to where your business is – this is particularly useful to those types of businesses that rely on local traffic such as plumbers, electricians, restaurants, or even dentists.

Management and accounting tools

As the orders and the money start rolling in you don’t want to be overwhelmed and without a system of managing it all. Get yourself set up properly from the start with the right business tools for startups and software to organise your accounts. Accounting tools, particularly useful for small businesses, include QuickBooks accounting tool and Xero accounting software. They will help you to keep your paperwork in order, manage receipts and invoices, log monies coming in and being paid out, and keep track of your cashflow. With cloud-based systems, you can do that while on the move and from any device so you don’t have to be tied to your desk to get your accounts in order.

At Make Me Local we know how important it is for small businesses to have the support and tools they need to be successful and have been helping businesses do that for over a decade. Talk to us today about getting yours off the ground too by dropping us a line at hello@makemelocal.com.