Setting up a business is an exciting time, but it’s obviously going to be costly too. Professionalising your brand, marketing your services and finding people to help you with launching a business all takes sensible budget management.
There are lots of ways that you can keep costs down – one of the main mantras to stick to is not running before you can walk. Renting bigger office space than you need, hiring too many people or buying unnecessary equipment can all set you back in the long-run if you spend too much, too early.
How else can you reduce launch costs?
Resourceful Marketing
Pushing the boat out when it comes to marketing your business doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll see the same return in leads and sales. Being creative and resourceful, especially early on, can see better results.
Being savvy and doing your research, instead of throwing money at marketing, can be the better approach. Using social media in smart ways means that you can spend relatively little, but utilise big audiences – same with more personalised content through email marketing. Encourage reviews and incentivise customers with discounts/deals to do so – when you’re starting out this is really important. Set up a website for a small fee, so you’ve got a central hub to point people towards, or even just handing out flyers in local areas.
Using Freelancers
Spending lots of money on hiring processes and using recruiters to find employees for your start-up can be murky territory. Firstly, you don’t know how things are going to go early on and it can pile on the pressure when you’ve employed people and you’re not making significant revenue yet or sure which skills are needed.
Enlisting the help of freelancers can be a great option, because you can hire them on an ad-hoc basis for when you need extra support. Instead of hoping to hire a marketing person who can do absolutely everything you need them to, you can get individual experts to work on something specific. You’ll save money in the long-run because you’re not taking on the costs incurred by full-time employees.
Virtual Office
When you start out, you want to professionalise your business as soon as possible – it’s more difficult to do this if you’re working from home. Especially if you want to register your address and don’t want your private details to entwine with work.
A virtual office is the perfect compromise. You don’t have to incur the costs of a full-on office situation, but you can use it as a business address to instantly professionalise your business.
At Hyde Park House, we also offer our clients access to meeting facilities, so you can invite customers or colleagues to meet you on business premises, instead of at your home, which can be uncomfortable. A telephone answering service is available too and secretarial services, so you can get on with building your business and we can help you to have a professional presence for your customers.
For more info, contact our team today.