The Four Corners Your Start Up Should NEVER Cut

No matter what sector you operate in, business start-ups generally have one trait in common – they’re lean.

A lack of revenue mixed with some sort of expenditure in the beginning of a business’ life span, entrepreneurs soon become expert at doing more for less. Many a great fledgling business has gone under in its first year of trading, simply due to the incredibly tight margins that are demanded.

Little wonder then, that business owners soon find the thriftiest way of doing things – from guerilla marketing tactics to learning some ironclad negotiating skills – as it could literally be make or break. No business has money to waste, but small start-ups have even less than most. While doing things efficiently is always smart practice no matter what your budget, sometimes this can spill over into a temptation to cut corners. By its very nature, this means prioritizing the immediate over your longer-term goals for the business and inevitably quality starts to suffer. The effect of this are not always immediately apparent, but over time, unless handled carefully, they can chip away at the integrity and reputation of your business, hollowing it from the inside out, until one day it’s no longer sound and things start to crumble. One of the most important skills a leader can learn is when to streamline and when to skip it.

Without this judgement, it’s too easy to trade a quick win for the long-term success of your company, often without even realizing it. There is very much a time and a place to make savings – and equally there are some corners it’s never wise to cut. Finding the balance point is the art of doing business successfully.

Doing Your Research

No business would survive if it didn’t continuously find new ways to meet the needs of its customers, and this is something that you’d be very unwise to try and economize on. At all stages of your company development, you need to be driven by market research – both quantitative and qualitative. Even if you think you know your customer inside out, wants and needs shift over time, and getting it wrong can be financially disastrous. Assumption has killed off many a promising business in its time. Whether it’s social listening, setting up a focus group, or incentivizing a post-sale survey, continuously checking the opinions of those who monetize your business cannot be an optional extra.

Even if it’s on a very small scale, keeping that feedback loop open is the key to delivering on customer expectations, generating a profit and continuing to grow your business. Solid market research can also be a very real cost-saver, as it stops you developing assets – brands, products or services – that are not going to work, and develop your ideas in another direction before you’ve invested in them too much.

Covering The Legal Bases

Most small business owners will not be legal experts or even necessarily have a huge track record of managing the legal implications of their business. So getting on board with expert legal advice is not an area where you should try to do things on the cheap. When it comes to the law, being uneducated is no defense – it’s simply not going to help in court to plead ignorance if something should go wrong.

Whether it’s compliance, procurement, data protection or contract negotiation, you need to be absolutely sure that your business is legally watertight. Investing in the right legal personnel has saved the skin of many a business caught in a tricky situation, and making sure your advisors are adequately resourced with the right matter management software could help you out on the darkest of days. Of course, no one likes to dwell on the worst case scenario of a legal catastrophe, especially entrepreneurs who broadly have to be optimists to have gotten into the game in the first place. But the reality is that sticky legal situations are fairly commonplace in a global trading landscape, so either investing well in experienced counsel or creating an in-house legal expert is the only way to go.

Boosting Your SEO

Rather than being an afterthought or something where it’s easy to under-invest, realizing the fundamental importance of search engine optimization in globally-competitive, Internet-driven times is an essential part of your small business strategy. Your website is your shop window to the world – the place where customers, suppliers, partners and financiers make their first judgements on who you are and what you do –  so it can’t reflect badly on your or be hard to locate.

If you aren’t properly visible online then who knows how much revenue you’re missing out on from potential customers who don’t know how to find you. Getting the search engine algorithms on your side is a long game approach, mainly due to their focus on quality link building, so if you think you can cut corners with old-fashioned black hat techniques then you may quickly find that your site gets penalized or even blacklisted, which could be the kind of thing which completely chokes off your revenue. So make sure instead to opt for creating quality content and forming beneficial partnerships, even if it seems the harder route.

Delivering Customer Support

Similar to market research, any area which impacts on the customer experience is not an area to go cheap on. Once a customer has a bad experience and doesn’t feel valued, there is usually a competitor just waiting around the corner ready to tempt them in. If you aren’t providing a smooth experience designed to retain their custom, then you may as well be pouring your entire marketing budget down the drain.

Fortunately there are some elements you can add which don’t cost the earth, provide a better customer experience and can save money once implemented. They usually involve machine learning – clever software as part of your CRM system which can deliver dynamic marketing that wastes less resources by virtue of being much more targeted to specific trigger behaviors.

Or it could be using a Chatbot to resolve simple customer care issues, assist with order queries and signpost to relevant information. Using big data and customer preferences to design an approach which enhances satisfaction and increases profits usually requires a little investment upfront in an appropriate software solution, but will soon pay you back in cost savings and enhanced takings.

This is a contributed post.