Small Business Owners | 15 tips for a small business owners

Home or Landing Page: 

Most customers are not ready to buy something from a new business. The first thing they will see is your homepage. Try to improve and add the best products at the top.

Your homepage must look organized and well managed. If you are working on a specific theme or if it changes with time, then try to follow and keep the article alive through your homepage.

Always keep the relevant items there because if the client cannot understand, they may not prefer buying from there and going somewhere else.

Here are 15 tips for small business owners

1. Know your place
2. Backup Plan
3. Give it time
4. Strategic Planning
5. Planning
6. Budgets and Targets
7. Advertising and Marketing
8. Use the latest Technology
9. Outsourcing
10. Surveys
11. Value differences and preferences
12. Money-Return guarantees
13. Survey your Competition
14. Survey Your Members
15. Always be a good listener

1. Know your place:

Know your place

Ultimately, the growth should provide you the kind of lifestyle you desire or want, whether that’s making a lot of money, having the freedom to do what you want to do, or being able to help others through your work and business.

When you decide to grow your business, it’s important to understand where your business falls or stands in the industry’s life cycle. Whether your industrial life cycle can make it easy or more difficult for your business to grow.

The chart here illustrates the natural progression of industry life cycles. Is your industry in the start-up, growth, maturity, or declining phase?

2. Backup Plan:

Always have a backup plan in your mind. If things go wrong or are not as smooth as expected, you can back off at any time.

It can be your luck, strategy, or struggles that can make it or break it. So, having a backup plan in your mind can help you cope with emergency situations. It is also beneficial to face a loss more than earning a profit.

3. Give it time:

When starting a business, keep in mind that it will not suddenly make a huge success. Do not compare your first days with someone’s last days. They might have worked harder, or it’s been months or years since they have established their business.

It’s your start. This will take to build trust with your customers and to reach them out. Growing a business takes days and nights of hard work. It demands your full-time struggle at the start, so do not hurry and give it time to develop.

4. Strategic Planning:

Strategic Planning

Strategic planning helps you find out where your business is, where you want it to stand and how you can get there. There are three steps to strategic planning:

1. Create or update your company’s Vision Statement. The Vision

The statement should express the overall purpose of your business, what your business does, and the values that it provides.

2. Create a SWOT Analysis that assesses the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats facing your business.

3. Set goals. Using the Vision Statement that you created earlier, SWOT Analysis and the

Business Needs Assessment you completed earlier, set specific goals for your business.

5. Planning:

Planning before starting a business is as important as the strategy. Writing down your plan before starting reminds you why you started, where you want to be and what it takes to be there.

You should plan all the things earlier. Every small to big thing should be designed. How do you want to start? How to advertise? What should be unique and different from others?

What will be your values and preferences? What would be your plan B if plan A fails? What would be the budget? All these things must be taken into consideration before starting any business.

6. Budgets and Targets:

After writing a plan, your next focus should be on making a budget and analyzing targets. Keep your team members aware of all this information, or it is better to make decisions together.

You must have a clear picture in your mind for your targets and budget. Set your weekly budgets and targets, and then go for monthly targets and, in the end, annual targets and outcomes.

In this way, it becomes easy to analyze where you are standing now and what more struggles are needed every week. All the things must go according to your budget.

7. Advertising and Marketing:

Advertising and Marketing

The most important and crucial step for any business is how you advertise. Using the best platforms, sources, ways, and technologies is very important for making your business recognized among people.

It’s not just the starting days that require advertisement. It should be done from time to time in the best way possible. Make surveys or conduct polls to know the choice of customers and use bestselling articles in your advertisements.

This helps develop interest among people and creates more traffic on your business page.

8. Use the latest Technology:

The latest Technology helps grow small business owners as the clients keep themselves updated in the latest ways. Write Copywriter blog posts related to your article.

Put the links in your stories and pages for blog posts so that customers get a detailed explanation of that article. Insert images in your posts to make them more interesting and look appealing in each possible way.

Label your pieces with sale tags and discount prices. Mention client reviews on your homepage so that other customers get a hint of authentication and develop an interest in it.

9. Outsourcing:

Outsourcing has become the easiest way to highlight your expertise and get original work done. You get experts in every field, which makes less to no chances of any loss.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What are we doing that is not one of our core capacities?
• What do we do to make it better and specific?
• What could we most likely outsource?

Take an example of many organizations that have outsourced their whole accounting function to their accounting firm, achieving huge savings in the process. So, this is also considered an acceptable way to make progress and helps in growing your business faster.

10. Surveys:

Surveys

Conducting or taking a client survey should go beyond client satisfaction issues. You want to increase your understanding of your customers’ needs and wishes, identify your weaknesses and recognize new chances to expand your business.

Some customers may be hesitant to give you their real, unbiased views if you conduct your own survey, so they prefer using a neutral party to complete the study for you.

To increase the response rate of surveys, think about rewarding clients with a special offer discount voucher or a free gift. There are many ways to conduct the surveys for small business owners, including:

• By post
• Making polls
• Over the web
• Asking Questions
• By telephone
• In-person

11. Value differences and preferences:

Remember, it is necessary to be different from your competitors in the same industry. Use the information you’re gathering from your customer’s reviews to know:

(a) what they prefer

(b) what they don’t prefer

Here’s how you can do it. List all the key features of your products and services, such as:

• Time of delivery
• Pricing values
• Variety of products 
• Website of the business 
• Staff responsiveness and behavior
• Handling of issues
• Product return policy
• Payment method
• Ordering system
• Warranty
• Regular communications

Then ask your clients to rate these attributes so you can know what their preferences are.

12. Money-Return guarantees:

Most organizations offer an implicit guarantee of their products, while some say “our products and services are authentic and guaranteed,”; but these sayings do not mean much by themselves.

Make it credible and specific if you want your promise or guarantee to create a difference.

For example:

• If we don’t deliver within the promised period, there will be no charges

• You may return any item within 15 to 30 days of purchase. Since your competitors may not offer such a specific guarantee, it could be beneficial and one of your key differentiators.

13. Survey your Competition:

Most small business owners don’t conduct these surveys, but the information they provide can be really helpful in keeping updated.

1. Get your team members together and complete a worksheet for each competitor company

2. Obtain their promotional materials to find out their strategies of promotion what they think are their strengths. Look at the trade and find out product reviews and comparisons on the internet.

3. Analyze the information you collected and prepare spreadsheets showing comparative results of strengths and weaknesses 6. Prepare an action plan for further improvement!

14. Survey Your Members:

Survey Your Members

Your team members should know more about the planning and what’s happening in your small business owners than anyone else. Conduct surveys between them regularly, and survey all of them.

Here’s an advised approach:

1. Make a questionnaire, allowing space for expansive answers and suggestions

2. Make it easy for people to approach and respond (i.e., mail, message, email, fax, polls, calls, etc.)

3. Make it voluntary and private. Their satisfaction makes a huge difference in establishing and growing any business. This makes them more excited, and they feel valued. In this way, more team coordination and understanding develop.

15. Always be a good listener:

When you meet with a client or prospective client (especially if you haven’t met them before):

• Ask them if they are happy and comfortable to answer some questions

• Ask “open questions,” i.e., those that require explanation and not only a yes/no answer

• Ask for clarification or explanation of a customer’s statement

• Ask if it’s OK to take written suggestions which make them feel that their views are important and valued.

• Don’t interrupt or disturb• Make them feel at ease so that they don’t hesitate in the future to give their views. This also helps to develop a good relationship with customers.