Advice for start-up businesses is everywhere, but while that information can be useful, it’s often just the same advice over and over again. Here you will find three tips that cover some things you might not have considered and which would make a smart move for a modern business, right from the get-go.

Identify your KPIs

KPIs, or Key performance Indicators, are the measurable areas of a business that demonstrate how effectively that company is achieving key objectives. However, it’s important to choose the right KPIs. They should be based on what is most important to your business so that they won’t necessarily be the same as everyone else.

There are, of course, some that will be important to most business owners. Here are a few to consider.

• Profit: Analyzing gross and net profit margin is the most obvious way to understand how well a business is performing.
• Cost: Monitoring cost ensures you are always keeping an eye on how to reduce and manage your costs.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This is a great indication of how well marketing campaigns are working and where your marketing budget can be used to greatest effect. For example, if customers coming from a Facebook campaign have a much higher CAC than those arriving through Google Ads, you might consider putting more money into Google Ads and less into Facebook. Or you might change your Facebook marketing tactics to bring the CAC down.
• Customer Churn Rate: This is about the customers you lose. Maybe they canceled their subscription or bought something from you once but didn’t become a repeat customer. This can indicate where you might need to make changes to retain custom.
• Employee Satisfaction: To increase employee productivity, it’s important to make sure you have a happy team. This metric can help you keep an eye on the situation and take action if satisfaction starts to slip.

To define your own set of KPIs, you will need to identify your business’s main objectives and how to track if they are heading in the right direction. This can be anything from the top objectives such as sales targets or more drilled down objectives such as how much web traffic is being driven by your social media channels.

Digitalize from the start

Depending on the needs of your business, putting the right processes in place from the very beginning will make your company more efficient and will leave you with more time to focus on building your business.

For smaller businesses, that could be as simple as converting your documents into a digital version and filing in dedicated file storage cloud space. For larger start-ups, companies such as TruQC offer comprehensive asset management software tailored to a business’s processes and workflow by creating a package to suit how you want to recall your data. It might sound complicated, but it actually makes life a whole lot simpler.

Have a marketing plan

Many businesses will start out knowing the thing they wish to market armed with a defined brand and a passion to make it work. Then they fall at the first hurdle as they have no structure to market the business. It’s not enough to simply build a website, set up requisite social media channels and place an advert with the local media. You need a coherent marketing plan.

Get these questions answered before wasting time and money on an incoherent marketing strategy.

• Define your customer: Who are they and where you will find them? This will help narrow down the channels you will market through.
• Define your message: what is it you want to tell people and what sets you apart from the competition – i.e., what’s your USP?
• Define your voice: have a recognizable voice that suits your business. Is it warm and chatty? Or authoritative and concise? Decide on your tone of voice and stick to it.
• Next steps: when you do get reactions, comments, and visits to your website, what happens next? Make sure you have a strategy from the start so that all your marketing effort isn’t in vain.

There’s lots of free information to help your new business get off to a flying start and it’s worth reading as much as you can.

All of this will make creating a detailed plan easier and ensure your launch starts with a bang.