5 Essential Things Every Small Business Must Do To Be Successful
If you run a small business, you want it to be successful. Why else would you be doing it, right? Unfortunately, most small businesses fail within the first five years, which means that the odds are stacked against you right from the start.
If you run a small business, you want it to be successful. Why else would you be doing it, right? Unfortunately, most small businesses fail within the first five years, which means that the odds are stacked against you right from the start.
That doesn’t mean you should give up before you’ve even gotten started, but it does mean you should make an effort to cover all the essential bases that will give you the best chance of success.
With that in mind, here are five essential things every small business must do to be successful:
1. Have A Unique Selling Point
If you set up a small business that is doing exactly the same thing as a million other small businesses, then your chances of seeing much success are limited because you will be competing with too many people, a number of whom will have been trading for years which gives them a distinct advantage.
That’s why you need a unique selling point. Even if you are selling goods or services that can be purchased elsewhere, there are ways of adding a USP. For example, if you want to sell t-shirts, you could come up with unique designs no one has done before or offer sizes that most other companies do not.
Basically, you need to find something that sets your business apart and gives consumers a reason to bypass the competition in favor of you.
2. Recruit The Best Employees You Can Afford
It is not over-egging it to say that employees can make or break a business. Employees can be the best or worst asset that you have depending on how well you recruit them. So, you ought to do your due diligence and carry out a DBS check on them before recruitment.
Excellent employees who are highly qualified, motivated, and happy to work hard will add much value to your business whereas lazy employees who don’t have the best education or experience, and who vie their role as just a job rather than a career are likely to drag your company down.
Obviously, as a small business, you probably don’t have a huge budget to attract the best of the best, but you can still aim high, and maybe look at benefits such as letting employees bring their dogs to work, that will cost you very little, but which decent employees may find attractive, to draw some decent talent in.
3. Get Insurance
Many small business owners do not bother meeting with insurance brokers to sort out a comprehensive business insurance policy because they either don’t think about it at all or they think that nothing bad will ever happen to them and it’s a great way to save money.
Many of these business owners have been completely devastated by fires, floods, litigation, and all manner of other horrors that have ruined their reputation, and in many cases, put an end to their businesses completely. If you’re serious about running a successful business, you need to be insured against all eventualities – it really isn’t negotiable.
4. Provide Excellent Customer Service Training
Without customers, you wouldn’t have much of a business, so it goes without saying that you need to provide your employees with a high level of customer service training so that they can interact with customers in an appropriate way, answer their questions, and solve their problems so that they can leave interactions with your business feeling positive towards the company its products and its staff. Bad customer service, and the resultant bad reviews, can kill your small business before it ever really gets off the ground, so don’t let that happen.
5. Create A Compelling Online Presence
As well as ensuring you have a user-friendly website in place if you want to attract as many customers as possible, and be as successful as possible, you also need to ensure that you are regularly interacting on social media, and most importantly of all, creating content that is engaging, entertaining, and informative because the more people who share your stuff, the more visibility your products and services will get and the more successful your business will be. Even if it means you have to hire an external content creator, it will be worth it in the long term.
As you can see, there are a lot of things you really must do if you want to give your business the best chance of success but actually, most of them are not too difficult to implement and they will give you a head start, so what are you waiting for? Get out there and make things happen.
