5 Tips to Avoid Pitfalls When Starting Your Own Company

[This article was written by Craig Middleton.]

If you have a business or are starting one soon, there are several pitfalls you need to avoid. Having your own company can seem like a lot of fun, money, and freedom. However, you need a great strategy. When you use proven methods, you can cut out a lot of big problems that you might have to face later on down the road. So don’t let your competition get the upper hand. Use the tips below for faster results:

Online Marketing

Marketing is the key to any business that wants to grow. With marketing, you are not just branding. This involves telling the audience what kind of business or product you have. Instead, you are also preparing them by guiding them through a funnel. The idea is that it sets up your sales team so that their job is much easier.

The first key to understand is to get enough attention. You need to get as much social media, email, and live attention as possible. After all, you can’t convert people if they are not in your funnel in the first place. Then, you must focus on bringing in great content that will keep people engaged.

When you are able to engage people on your page, it boosts your organic rankings. Thirdly, you need to drive emotional reasons to buy. Use images, feelings, and outcomes to get your customers excited about your product. Finally, you use calls to action to get them over the line. But marketing is just one part of the puzzle.

Sales

When you have your marketing plan in place, you can start to think about your sales. Whereas with marketing you can use a lot of guesses and testing to confirm your ideas, sales is more of a numbers game.

You need to be setting quotas for your sales team along with clear goals. A lot of owners and managers make the mistake of not training their people enough. Furthermore, they don’t even touch up with their sales team to make sure they stay motivated. Eventually, you could lose your best sales members and start to decline in revenue. So make sure that a great sales culture is part of your DNA.

Accounting

Proper accounting can take a lot of time to figure out. Therefore, after reading this, you might decide to hire a professional. Then again, you can always find out things for yourself that you can use in your business even if you can’t afford a professional right now.

The first mistake to avoid is paying too many taxes. If you start writing off more of your expenses, you can already start reducing your taxes. A lot of things you pay for as a normal person can be written off. In addition, if you do a lot of traveling, a lot of your income can be written off too. This depends on where you earn it, but with research, you can take a chunk out of your taxes.

Security Traps

With things like tap networking, you can see your whole network. This gives you a higher level picture that helps you dictate when and where connections are happening. The key here is to prevent intruders from hijacking your digital systems.

Not Hiring Soon Enough

As you start to grow, you want to hire more. Bringing more people into the fold creates more innovation. Eventually, it will pay off. You will have more products and services from meetings, sessions, and whiteboard marathons that you never thought were possible.

When it comes to modern-day business, you need to have a plan that doesn’t slow you down. You can spend a lot of time spinning your own wheels if you don’t have the right strategy. So don’t put yourself in that position. Instead, make sure your company is poised for rapid growth. Use the tips above and start generating the kind of success you deserve in your business.