As a small business owner, it’s often seductive to see yourself as the manager of a vast island.
You’re at the top of the tree, working relentlessly on your own to manage a business, grow your customer base, and develop your value proposition. You derive satisfaction from your successes in the knowledge that you built your firm up from scratch with very little help. The downside of this approach is that you’ll tend to overlook vital services that can help you boost your business. This article’s about opening your eyes to these services and encouraging you to engage with them where possible.
Financial Responsibilities
Running a small business means keeping track of how much you’re spending and how much you’re making. That’s something that you will have seen as absolutely fundamental from the start. Seeing that you are earning more than you’re spending is a sign that you’ve made a profitable and valuable business. The issue here comes as your firm expands, and you end up having more and more on your plate. You might lose track of your financials, including the granular data that can help you cut costs, plan for your taxes, and guarantee good cash flow.
That’s where finding external help can be particularly useful. If you understand the role of a bookkeeper, you’ll know that they aren’t just counting beans and showing you how much you’ve made in net and gross profit in the past month. They’re also there to offer financial guidance and a far more accurate and informative breakdown of your finances than you’re likely to create on your own. It’s these insights and the labor you’ll no longer have to perform which are the key benefits of engaging with a bookkeeper in 2022.
Marketing
How much time do you spend on marketing your small business? It’s likely that the time you spend is nowhere near long enough, considering that marketing is the single most important factor in the drumming up of new business and the growth of your visibility, web traffic, and a number of customers or clients. You’ll likely have a website, and you may well have social media pages – but it’s less likely that you’re leveraging them successfully in order to generate the growth in business that’ll boost your entire firm this year.
Those skills – the skills you would need to really market your products, services, or brand successfully – are difficult to find and bring to your business. If your team only consists of a handful of people, it’s unlikely that you can bring in in-house marketers to help you with marketing. So seeking external help via a marketing agency is the way to go. Speak openly with a marketing agency you find online to see what they think they can do to boost sales at your firm. You may be surprised by what they can offer you.
Automation Software
Some small businesses are more about the offline, physical world than the online, digital one. That’s completely understandable, and you’ll know if you’re a business that has little to Gian by becoming more online. Still, even if you’re not keen on using social media and marketing in the digital world, there are some software programs that can help any business thrive, saving you cash and time while generating far more insightful reports that’ll help you plan the future of your firm.
Here, we’re thinking of the kinds of software that report on your sales data and forecast how the coming months might look for your firm. There’s automation software to cover your payroll so that you don’t have to spend time paying your staff each month. You can automate customer services with bots and voice bots, and you can automate email marketing campaigns through smart marketing software. All of this can help you reduce the time that you spend completing certain tasks, giving you more time to focus on the most important tasks you have on your to-do list.
Consultants
The word consultant might provoke a shudder of fear in you, or it might be something that you’re completely open to. Either way, it’s worth going into a little detail about what consultants can do for small businesses. You see, a consultant is someone who has decades of experience working with hundreds of small businesses. They’ll know what works and what tends to fail for such businesses in a whole raft of different areas. They’ll also be incredibly sharp when it comes to spotting inconsistencies and inefficiencies in your business, offering practical advice to help you run a tighter ship.
All this can be done in the space of a week, which means that the cash you outlay on a consultant won’t be astronomical. The insights that they’re able to give you can be profound, especially if you’ve never had an external pair of eyes look over your business and where you might be going ever so slightly wrong. Bring in a consultant that you trust to do this for you. You’ll find consultants by searching online, and you can check their reviews and testimonials to see if they’re a good fit for your business.
Recruiters
If you follow the above advice, you’re making it more likely that your business will grow in the coming months. While that’s excellent news, it also entails the growth of work within your firm, which can equate to the requirement to hire more staff on a full-time or temporary basis. Hiring staff on your own can take many hours of reading resumes and checking references – and it’s often far more practical to simply outsource all of this to a recruiter who will be able to pair you with a worker in a matter of days – and sometimes even hours.
This is especially the case if you’re simply looking for an office administrator to tackle a growing volume of tasks in your back office. There are thousands of these professionals in the jobs market, and some are looking for short-term positions in between terms at university. These make excellent temporary hires if you’re in need of labor for a short period of time.
Add these extra services to your business in order to grow and develop as a firm in the coming weeks, months, and years.
