Start

Have you started your business but need some help and support to keep you on the right track?

Britain is a nation of entrepreneurs. It’s estimated that there are almost 5.4m SME’s in the UK, with a combined turnover of £1.8 trillion, 47% of all private sector turnover in the UK. One thing for certain is that growing your business and the financial success that comes with it doesn’t come without an awful lot of hard work and plenty of expert advice.

We all revel in the success of moguls like Richard Branson, Lord Sugar and Simon Cowell. Many of us are addicted to TV programmes such as Dragons’ Den and The Apprentice that try to unlock the secrets of how to grow a business.

Anyone who has watched Dragons’ Den knows how important it is to get your corporate structure right, have a clear business plan and put good systems in place.

In the majority of cases, developing a start-up business is all about always being clear about which steps to take next. To help this process, we have a checklist to make sure your thinking and your business plan are on the right track:

1. Offer what people want to buy/need, not just what you want to sell.

Too often, people jump into a business built around a product or service they think will be successful, rather than one that is already proven to have a market.

2. Get cash flowing ASAP.

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business and is absolutely essential to feed bottom-line profits. So you need to find ways to jump start cash flow immediately.

3. Always find new ways to keep costs low.

All the cash flow in the world is worthless if it’s not positive cash flow, which means you have to bring in more cash than you pay out. Keep overheads as low as possible.

4. When planning, always overestimate expenses and underestimate revenues.

Being conservative in your numbers doesn’t mean you are willing to accept those numbers, it just means you are arming yourself with information you can work with.

5. Focus on sales and marketing fanatically.

In business, nothing happens until a sale is made. Find good ways to get leads, convert leads into sales and make sure you keep getting repeat sales from your customers. Too many entrepreneurs focus on getting their brand right before they start to generate leads. That is exactly the wrong way to go about business. Leads are always more important than your brand, so don’t waste money getting your brand right at the expense of spending that same money to find new customers.

6. Find ways to exponentially increase profits.

It’s as simple as getting more leads, converting more leads into customers, increasing the number of times those customers buy from you, increasing the average price point of your sales and increasing your profit margins.

7. Test and measure everything.

You can’t change what you don’t measure, and you can’t tell if a program or strategy is working if you are not faithfully testing, measuring and tracking your results.

8. Accept that learning more equals earning more

You’ll need to be committed to learning as much as you can about sales and marketing and operations if you want to have a truly success business.

9. Don’t discount, add value.

Whenever you discount, you are taking money directly out of your pocket and directly from your bottom-line profit. So don’t do it. Instead, create added value propositions all the way up and down your product or service line. Whatever the industry is, look to hold your price points, increase your margins with the low-cost or no-cost extras. In the end, those little things won’t cost you a lot, but will build up goodwill with your customers and customer base.

10. Get a coach.

Even if you don’t get a business coach at first to help you and guide you in your planning and operation, get someone who is objective and outside of your business you can rely on for nitty gritty business advice and to hold you accountable to getting results. Too often, we think we have all the answers and are the only people who can really get things done. The reality is that another set of eyes can work wonders for how you operate both on and in your business.

This is just an initial checklist which we hope will be valuable in helping you clarify your thinking and help you to prioritize some activities in your start-up planning.

One of our philosophies is there are no mysteries in business or in life; there’s just information you don’t know yet.

So we aim to help you prepare as well as you can through our SPARK Start Programme. We know you will need to make changes and corrections but armed with the right strategies up front we aim to assist you to cut the time it will take you to successfully get to your ultimate destination – wherever that maybe for you and your business.

Whether you are self-employed, part of a team or thinking of setting up for the first time – our SPARK Start Programme will help you take the next steps in business.

As a resident member of SPARK your first week commences with an introduction to SPARK incubator and its regional centres. You will also hear about the workshops, tools, training and support the SPARK team will offer you.

For the first 6 months you will be supported, challenged and guided towards growing your business or developing your idea. You will receive regular and meetings with the SPARK team to help you set and meet your goals. You will be provided with access to our mentors, advisors and support services, which can help you to build a robust action plan and accelerate the development of your idea or business into a commercial enterprise.

You will have the opportunity to attend workshops covering raising finance, start-up resources, initial marketing, employment and investment. You will be actively encouraged to attend clinics run by our ambassadors such as the Growth Hub, The Chamber of Commerce, Santander, RBS etc. and where appropriate encouraged to participate in showcasing opportunities and investment days.

Crucially you will also be introduced to your fellow SPARKIES!

SPARK will provide you with as many opportunities as we can but it’s up to you to take them and capitalise on them. SPARK’s goal is to help you grow your business as our mission is to retain creative and tech talent in the local area thus attracting investment to the Black Country, Staffordshire and The Marches.

For the different memberships of SPARK please click here.