Sunday, December 07, 2008

3 Essential Tools for Starting and Maintaining a Small Business

3 factors that drive the success of small businesses.


1) Acquiring start-up capital
2) Finding customers
3) Accounting for, budgeting and controlling sales and expenses



The following resources will help your small business achieve these success factors.

Acquiring Start-Up Capital

An adequate supply of capital is essential as many profitable businesses fail because they don’t have enough cash to pay their employees and suppliers. But what is an adequate supply of capital? The only way to tell is by doing a significant amount of research on your potential market and formally documenting this in a business plan. I’m sure you know that a business plan is a very important document that is crucial to convincing your banker to lend you money.


There are two ways to obtain a business plan.

1) Do it yourself by amending a business plan template, or
2) Hire a professional to do it for you.

Obviously obtaining 1) will be a great deal cheaper.



Finding Customers

Finding customers is a difficult and expensive task for service business owners such as accountants, lawyers and plumbers. It is believe that a cost effective marketing strategy for service business owners is to simply give all their personal contacts a few business cards.



Accounting For, Budgeting and Controlling Revenue and Expenses

Accurate accounting is very important for small business owners. It’s essential that you have timely access to information that could make or break your business. If stocks are running low – you need to know about it. If a large proportion of your debtors haven’t paid – you need to know about it. If you do not react to these situations quickly you may have a situation where you don’t have enough money to pay your employees – or worse still someone is stealing cash out the till.


Hopefully you now have an idea of some of the tools that you can use to grow and maintain your small business. 

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As Featured On Ezine Articles

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