Start Your Own Business Tips

So we’ve finally made the move to our first fully fledged office and it feels like a great move for the company and moral is on a high, but what are the options when it comes to getting and office and what are the pros and cons.

There are two main options for small businesses when it comes to setting up a perminnet office outside of your home; serviced offices and wholly let offices.

Services offices are offices where you pay a flat monthly rate in return for the complete package. Everything is usually included so there is no water bill, electricity bill, internet bill etc. This is what we have. If you Google ‘office space’ you can usually find a ton of people who provide directories of offices in your area. A tip is to get the contact details from the directory sites and contact the office company direct rather than going through the agent. The office co will have more wriggle room when it comes to discounts that way as there is no commission of them to pay. We found this out afterwards .

Wholly let offices are offices where by you rent a space and are responsible for the majority of costs, so you have to pay the business rates and the heating bills etc.

My personal opinon for most small businesses is to go for the serivced offices as most businesses of this size value the predicatbility of the costs from month to month.

Why get an office?

Well in our case there was two reasons, one was that working from home is not ideal when there is more of you in the company than just yourself. Having everyone in the same place at the same time also has loads of spill over advantages such as morale and better for coming up with new ideas.

The other reason for us was that more and more of our bigger clients wanted to meet up. Having a fixed place to meet these clients, in my view, greatly increases the professional look of the business.

Why not to get an office?

Well getting an office means you have to commute to work each day which adds a big cost to yourself. Also the office its self is going to add around £270+vat a month per a person to the business. It may be that you are unable or unwilling to add to your costs.

Another reason is many people start a small business because they want to work at home, time with kids, time with partners etc. If this was the motivation for setting up business, you may not want to go back to what feels a bit like a normal job.

Should you get an office check-list:

• Can you afford it?
• Is it expected for your industry?
• Are you happy to go back to the daily commute?

P.s. Check out our new office on our facebook fan page. Become a fan if you like and comments are always welcome.

Matt

Lots of friends who are thinking of setting up businesses come to me and ask me about bank accounts, marketing, websites etc and they usually find what I have to say useful. Although this is only drawing from my own experience, here are my small business start-up essentials.

Your Bank Account

You’re going to need a bank account for your business to keep things separate and allow you to book keep more easily than if your business account is also your personal account. I had a good look around when starting up and found that the best deals are usually online based versions of the business bank accounts from the major banks. I went with HSBC online business account.

Online accounts general come with lower costs. I think the HSBC account came with free banking and very good rates for additional services. Something to note, business bank accounts will cost you more than your personal bank account. There is often a standing monthly fee and then additional fees for things like a few pence on each cheque, a percentage on cash paid in.

Telephones

Lots of small businesses use their mobiles as the main contact number. In some cases this can be a good thing with respect to customer perceptions because it conveys a small business image and some people like this. For other businesses you want to look more professional and so you might want to consider getting an 0845 number or setting up a divert from a landline to your mobile. I use a company called Gradwell who provide an internet based telephone service. This doesn’t mean you have to use your computer to make calls; we plug special internet phones directly into the internet socket. Generally this type of service is cheaper, but the main advantage for us is that we have set up, though their website, a system whereby when a client calls our 0845 number, multiple phones at different locations will ring at the same time, this includes mobiles.

Your Web Site

It’s pretty essential these days to have a website for your business. People like to research more about your business nowadays before calling. I would strongly recommend not getting a mate to do it for you, it’s definitely cheaper and people can tell. Check out 101PoundWebsite.com for a really affordable small business package which includes everything you need and will look the business.

When you are getting your website sorted, make sure you have lots of information on there, include testimonials, product images, prices and make it clear how people can get in contact.

Internet

The internet is also a must these days, staying in contact with your clients, finding suppliers etc. There are three main methods these days. ADSL (though your existing telephone line), Cable (though Virgin Media) and mobile (using a USB dongle). The most reliable and future proof is cable. The network has been built for the internet where as BT’s network mostly has been adapted for the use. You can also get higher speeds on Virgin. Mobile broadband is great if you need the internet on the road, however coverage can be sketchy and speeds are still pretty slow.

Promotion

I’ve talked about getting a website but you also need to get your name out there in other ways. Most basic thing is to make sure that things like your web address are on your business cards and letter heads. Yell.com can be a good to get your business details out there and will normally cost around £20 pounds a month depending on what kind of advert you go for. Yellow Pages can be good and bad nowadays. More people are looking online but still a good few are using the printed book- think about your demographic.

If you work from home like I have done for the last two years you will no doubt sometimes wonder if working at home is holding your potential back. Could you be more productive? Would you be happier? Here are some of the top tips I have found around the net and a few of my own.

1. Separate Work and Living Space

One of the best things you can do if you work from home is to keep your work and living environments entirely separate. Ideally a separate room or building if you are lucky enough. If you have somewhere you can close off at the end of the day it will help you psychologically switch off from work too. Equally it will help you switch to work mode when you leave your ‘living areas’ and enter your work space.

If you cannot completely physically separate your areas, at the very least try to move your work stuff out of site. Put paper work away in a draw and switch off your computer.

2. Dress for work

This one might sound a bit wild, but you really should dress for work. Working successfully from home is all about being about to switch between your home life and your work life as quickly and effectively as possible. I have found now, and so have others I have read on the net, that actually dressing for work when its time to work can be a great way to get into the right mind set.

At the very least I strong suggest the ’shoe trick’. When you work put your shoes on, when you are relaxing at home take them off. Probably sounds a bit pointless but if you do anything I recommend this. You soon train yourself to know that when your in your shoes your at work and it gets much easier to switch to work mode.

3. Keep Strict Hours

Not always possible but if you can work set hours do it. Don’t sleep in because you can, force yourself to get up in line with normal business hours and equally don’t work past your normal end of day time. I’m a bit of a hypocrite on this one because I often do both these things,   do find that stopping at a set time when you may still have work to do acts as a great motivator to start working the next day.

4. Take Breaks

Just because you work from home doesn’t mean you don’t get breaks. Make the time to have a good lunch hour and take breaks through out the day, especially if you are stuck in front of a computer as I am. Ideally if you can go out of your home, take a walk, walk the dog etc. I have found one of the worst things with working at home is that you seem to never leave the house.

5. Virtual Offices

I recently looked into virtual offices. They are a great way for a small business to give a more professional appearance. You get a professional looking address…something like 10 Buckingham Palace or something, a telephone number which you will normally get someone answering your calls when you cannot answer your calls yourself. This is great if sometimes you cannot be at your desk and you don’t want calls to ring off. These aren’t too expensive.

7. Organisation

Keep to do lists to stay on top of your work load and plan your next day at the end of the last. This way you spend less productive time thinking what next to do. Another great thing with to do lists is that you can cross out things once they are done which I find is a great way to keep motivated and see the progress I’m making.

With more and more business moving onto the web, search engine optimisation or SEO is become increasingly important to businesses and web designers. A fantastic site is worth w nothing if no one ever sees. SEO is the art of making your site friendly to search engines like Google and Yahoo to achieve the best ranking for the keywords that your business is targeting.

So, what’s the golden rule to achieving that number one page rank? Well no one really knows exactly how the search engines rank pages apart from the search engines themselves. What we do know though, through observation, is what things seem to make a difference and what things did make a difference but nowadays seem not to.

What counts?

The main elements that seems to make the biggest difference are your site’s content, the number of links to your site and the quality of those links i.e. do they come from sites which are relevant and rank high themselves, and the readability/structure of your site by the search engines.

Site Content

The content of your site is important because search engines scan it to see which words come up most often. If your target keywords are ‘houses in Cardiff’ and those words are nowhere on your site…guess what… your site isn’t going to rank too well for those words. Try to include your keywords throughout your site. Closer to the top is considered more important that at the bottom of a page and using them in headings or in bold help search engines identify them as important.

Links

Links have become very important in SEO. If you think about it, it makes a lot of senses to count the number of links to your site and analysing where those links come from to discover how high up the rankings a site should come. If a lot of people from high ranking sites link to your site then it probably means that your site is worth looking at, or from the other point of view, if no one links to you then it looks like no one thinks your site is worth looking at. So the lesson is… get links to your site, lots and make sure they come from quality, relevant sources. If you’re a house rental company for example you want links from other house rental companies or trade magazines.

Structure

Structure is also important in SEO. I would recommend close attention to good structure in your HTML and nowadays you really should be using CSS for the design of your site. 101Poundwebsite.com considers these things very important and all sites created are made in this way. Well structured HTML helps search engines to know what’s important in a web page. Text in a heading tag is likely to represent the theme of the content below it. A H1 tag is more important than a H2 and so on.

CSS drastically reduces the clutter in the HTML. Design and content are separated so the search engines don’t have to try to work their way through complicated table tags.

Other Ideas

There are other ways to get visitors to your site; two ways are paid advertising such as Google’s AdWords programme and offline advertising.

Google’s AdWords programme allows you to advertise your website on the right hand sponsored links section on Google’s results pages. Each time someone clicks through to your website you pay an amount based on a value you have set previously.

Listing are ordered by how much you are prepared to spend for the click so setting a low click price will save you money in one respect, but you may be so low down the list that no one ever clicks though. Offline advertising is sometimes forgotten but can be a very effective means to drive traffic to your site. Think about your vehicles, letter heads, premises, newsletters, uniforms etc. Put your website everywhere and people will come.

As I have said previously, there is no golden formula to achieve that number one rank but these elements mentioned seem to important. The web is full of SEO advice, I would recommend reading a few articles and certain themes will emerge.

Welcome to the Start Your Own Business Tips blog.

This blog is dedicated to providing easy, plain English tips for small businesses. I don’t claim to be an expert but instead will draw from my own experiences from starting my own business 101Poundwebsite.com which provides websites to small business people like you.

A variety of areas will be covered such as how to work effectively at home, setting up an office, ways to market your business etc.

If you would like to write an article for the blog please do get in contact. It’s a great way to get a link to your website which will help your search rank.

Hope you find the blog useful and please do leave comments.

Matt