6 Things You Need To Know About Starting A Business (Part 2)
My Story: (in case you missed it)
For the last ten years I have run a fairly successful business. At the height of the business I had four employee's and brought in $200,00 a year. I have since scaled back but continue to generate decent income from this business. When I started out I didn't have a mentor to guide me through some of the basic's of starting a business, nor did I do the proper research.
My new business (Free on Amazon later today)
Why these two blog posts?
It's my goal here at Tales of Work to help anyone with their job or their business to succeed. There are too many negative people and things in life that will try to hold us back or see us fail in our work or businesses. Any tips that I can give from my own personal experience that will benefit someone is the my main goal for this website and my writing.
If you are staring a business or have just started a business, or are thinking about starting a business, here are the final three points (out of six) that I feel would benefit you:
Pay your taxes!!! This is one of the biggest lessons I hope you take away from this series. I learned the hard way the consequences of not paying your taxes, and I'm still paying for that lesson. You have to set aside money for your taxes, not only at the end of the year, but also for your quarterlies. Your quarterlies are estimated taxes that you pay every three months and if you don't pay them throughout the year, you will get hit with a penalty when you file your taxes. Pay this every quarter, even if it's not the full amount, you'll avoid the penalty. For those starting a business that used to be employee's, it can be very deceiving. You're used to an employer taking your taxes out of your check, you don't even think about it. When you get those first checks from your business, they seem SO HUGE. I remember my first check for $1000, I almost fainted. I would then go on throughout the rest of that year getting large checks, the whole time telling myself I would be able to make up the tax money at the end of the year. You can guess what happened, right? The end of the year came and I had $10 in my kids piggy bank to pay my taxes, not very smart! You would have thought I learned my lesson after that first year, I didn't and continued this pattern for a few more years when it all came crashing in my face! Learn the lesson it took me years to learn, you may be getting larger checks, it might seem like you're making more, but you're not if you're not saving for your taxes. Many people have lost their businesses over tax issues, avoid being the next one, SAVE AND PAY YOUR TAXES!
Charge enough for your services. When someone is starting a business their first thought is they have to discount their prices to attract customers. While this may be true, it's only true for the first month or so, you can run into danger if you go beyond that time limit. When you keep a lower price for an extended amount of time you attract a false customer base. When I first started out I charged a dirt cheap price to attract new business, it worked and I had more work then I could handle. About three months in I decided it was time to raise my prices, I put out a memo saying I was raising my prices by $50 (pretty low amount in this industry) and it caused an uproar. These are the customers that you want to weed out in the beginning, these customers will also be your biggest complainers, always looking for a discount. After your initial start, raise your prices, you may think you'll lose business and you might lose a few customers but if you have the customer service we talked about in the first part of this series, you'll retain a solid core of customers. You will also learn a valuable lesson that most businesses still haven't learned: doing more with less! You can build a solid, extremely profitable business with fewer customers, you'll make the same or more if you will raise your prices. Don't be afraid, if you keep your customers happy and go the extra mile, they'll be happy to use your services at whatever price you charge (just don't abuse that trust with extreme pricing).
Don't worry about the competition. A big mistake most young businesses make is to look at or copy what their competition is doing, don't do it! If you are giving excellent customer service, providing quality for your customers, what anyone else is doing doesn't matter. When you look at the competition it throws you off your game, it makes you doubt what you're doing. You get tempted to change what you do or how you do it, you might even be tempted to change your prices. Be the leader in your industry, make your business the business other businesses look at and try to copy.
I hope you can use theses tips, I wish someone had given them to me when I started out. You live and learn, right? Take these tip and start an amazing business that we'll be reading about in the news! Take care of your customers and have them spread the word about your business. Go out there and CRUSH IT, we need you more than you know…..
What advice would you give to someone starting a business? Give your amazing tips with a comment:
