5 Tips for a Business Start-Up

Five Things You Need to Know About Starting A Business

Launching a new business is exciting, hard work and rewarding. I love the range of things that I’m learning, the freedom it gives me to plan my day but most of all, I love meeting new people, finding out about their businesses and how they do things.

One of the joys has been how happy people have been to share their experiences and pass on their tips. In that spirit, here are five things that I learnt from setting up my own business.

Ideas Evolve So Adapt Your Business

My initial business idea was well thought out, but it changed over time as I learnt more about the marketplace and my customers and took more account of my personal mix of skills and experience. This development has been essential in creating something that fires me up every day and most importantly, makes sense to me.

The evolution of my business has also meant that I’ve had to revisit some of the decisions I took early on, some quite fundamental to my business and change them. Thankfully, being in the early stages of my business it’s been something I could do without much difficulty. Now I have a real sense of purpose for my business and I know where I’m going with it. It will grow and continue to evolve, but I have a real firm foundation on which to build.

Learn From Those Around You

The above evolution couldn’t have happened if I hadn’t taken a look at what other people were doing and learned from them. Whether it was a tip on how to do something or a different way of looking at anything, I have absorbed all the blogs, podcasts, training and advice I could to understand how I could make my business work.

Discussing how others deal with things has helped me deal with questions that crop up, and has been positive for my confidence and motivation.

Break Tasks Down

Keep your momentum going by breaking seemingly insurmountable tasks down into their component parts and tackle the most achievable or time-critical first. When I finally get to the heart of a task, I find it is no longer so huge and daunting and often I’ve learnt enough along the way to tackle it. Success with the initial elements also means I feel more ready to face more difficult jobs.

Measure Success in Non-Monetary Terms Too

Woah! I know this sounds a little radical, but in the early stages of a business, there may not be much monetary success to measure! Instead focus on how far you’ve come in achieving your plans, creating a coherent offering or on how much you’ve learnt and how it will shape your business.

These non-monetary measures will still be important as the business grows and develops and it gives me a certain satisfaction that I can count them as legitimate measures of success because, to me, they’re a lot more interesting than numbers, no matter how essential those numbers may be.

Celebrate Your Successes

If you don’t, no one else will! No one else will even know that you’ve got to the bottom of that tricky concept that you need to make your next project work, that you’ve won that award or even that you made a million unless you tell them.

It can be easy to forget how far you’ve come and when things are tough it’s reassuring to look back at everything you have achieved, so let your world know what you’ve done and celebrate it!

For more information on how I can help you with your social media so that you can get on with running your business email info@redcurrantsocial, find me, Deborah Padwick on LinkedIn or you can follow Redcurrant Social on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.