The Small Business Fineprint

Your small business is your life raft. It’s your hail mary long shot for a rewarding career that sees you set the agenda and ultimately benefit from the hard work you put in.

As a wise entrepreneur once said, you can’t get rich on someone else’s money. Which, strictly speaking, isn’t necessarily true (just ask any sports star who plays for a team!). But the sentiment is appealing. Let’s look at some of the more hidden areas of starting a business that you’ll need to master before you can make money your way.

How are you going to accept payment?

More often than not, new businesses overlook the importance of a credit card reader. It’s actually quite astounding that, with alarming regularity, new businesses come to within a hair’s breadth of completing the first sale before the entrepreneur at the helm realizes they will have to email over the bank details.

To be fair, the first sale tends to come before the company is ready to throw open the doors – so to speak – and trade at full capacity. But that is all the more reason to treat payment methods with the urgency and respect they deserve. Always look into how you plan to accept payment before you are left looking underprepared and less than professional.

Where will you store your data?

Client data is hot property. You cannot hope to be taken seriously as a business if you plan to store your data on a laptop with no backup functionality.

Of course, to begin with, the first few days of your new business will necessarily involve working on a device with a single save point. But before you make the move towards customers from the general public (rather than merely selling your newly-fledged goods or services to family and friends), you need to look into online data backup.

The cost of such services can be off-putting right at the start – launching a new business typically means trying to keep costs down. But the value is plain to see.

If the cost of losing access to your data for one day outweighs the cost of paying for online backup, that is a clear sign that you must give serious consideration to making the switch to outsourced data storage.

Location, location, location

Location. It’s everything. That’s not to say your business has to have south-facing gardens. Nor does it mean that your neighbors should lean more toward accepted high-society brands, such that you might piggyback off their appeal within a geographic location.

Location simply means that you need somewhere to call home that isn’t actually your home. The reason is that your company, in the very early days, will likely be registered to your home address. But here’s what happens.

Potential customers look you up. They see that you are a small-time business working from home. They think you will only have one employee (you) and that the work will be rushed and less than accurate.

And they choose to buy from your competitor, which has a business address on an actual industrial estate. You too need that level of reassuring location relevance on your side.

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