Starting out business can be exciting but stressful at the same time. Generally, at the beginning of any new venture, businesses require a lot of time, capital, and passion to get off the ground, and lacking in any of these, can land you in all kinds of trouble and distressed.
While the ‘time’ and ‘passion’ aspects of building a business are central to your own work ethic, making sure your cash flow is in the best possible situation can sometimes be a little difficult for anyone new to entrepreneurial circles.
It may be difficult to keep on top of your cash flow at a time in business that is notoriously volatile, but there are ways to make sure you are doing everything you can to keep costs down, and profits up when starting out.
If You Need a Loan, Do Your Research
Getting your business off the ground can require a high capital than you can personally fund. In such situations, a loan is a perfectly respectable way of getting your business up and running.
Choosing the right loan though can be confusing. Depending on how much money you need, how long you have been in business, and how much you are making in profit can affect the type of loan you are capable of acquiring.
De facto, different lenders have different rates which would have to be paid back. This is pretty obvious but finding the right loan for you isn’t always that easy. Take your time to look around, compare business loans lenders such as Bizit, to help you select the right service that would fulfill your needs, whilst simultaneously being manageable and realistic.
Telephony
While there has been quite a lot of change in the workplace due to the advancements we have made in technology over the past decade. One thing has remained the same though, and that is the need to communicate. Without a phone line, your company runs the risk of looking amateurish and untrustworthy, so getting yourself a customer hotline should be a priority.
This doesn’t however, mean that you need to pay for an actual telephone line. With many online options available, the need to have a physical line tied to your company is long gone, and in its place is a plethora of services that are cheaper, more functional, and infinitely more flexible.
Skype, RingCentral, and Vonage offer subscriptions for regular telephone numbers that can be routed to your smartphone, tablet, PC, or pretty much any platform you desire. They also come with the added bonus of video calling, and are easily expandable should you decide that another line is needed for a new employee.
As long as you have a steady internet connection, the calls can be even better in quality than a standard landline. All this comes at a price that is cheaper than your average landline package and a lot more useful.
If you are a starting a business that is flexible in its locale, landlines make little to no sense. Equally, being contactable whilst ‘on the go’ is fast becoming a necessity for the modern small business. As such, you have a choice between an expensive single-function service, or a malleable, cheaper one.
Premises
Before signing up to rent an office space for 12 months, it is a sensible idea to ask yourself whether you really need to. While an office is a necessity for some, not everyone needs to have one, especially when your company is in its fledgeling stage.
Working from home is obviously the cheapest option, but if that is impossible or impractical, there are some companies out there who specialise in short term, rentable office spaces. This can be anything from a single desk in a small room, to plush meeting rooms, or whole floors for bigger teams.
This approach can be great for new small business for a few reasons: Firstly, you can rent on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Secondly, you can move your office to wherever you happen to be (so long as they have space near your location). And you can rent rooms that aesthetically trump anything you could currently afford if you were renting with yearly leases. If you have a very important meeting with a client, rent the penthouse meeting room.
The next day, simply rent the standard office desk. This way you look impressive to the onlooker when you need to exude the “wow” factor, but are also saving money by only renting the more conservative rooms for the rest of the week.
Final Words
With a little effort, research, and planning, you can save a lot of money by simply working within your means. If you don’t need to tie yourself down to a long and expensive contract, whether that is your telephone system, or the office itself, it quite often pays to look at the alternatives. And with so many options now available, there has never been a more exciting time to build that empire.