Starting a business is not easy.
Getting everything set up correctly can make the operation of your business run smoothly, especially when you need to be working on or in the business to make sure it survives.
Last year 660,000 companies were established in the UK, which is up from 608,000 in 2015. That doesn’t include sole traders. But 97% of business startups fail in the first three years.
So when you are firefighting to survive, if you have tackled the issues in the diagram below you will have a better chance of surviving because these issues have been tackled.
The more of the issues you deal with before you start running your business the easier it will be to operate.
The FIRST thing to do is a skills audit on yourself.
- Do you have the skills necessary to run a business?
- Which skills do you have and which ones should you learn and what can you delegate?
- What are the functions of a business and what do you know about them?
The main functions are:
- Marketing
- What is your product or service and is there a market for it?
- Sales
- Selling your product or service to a client or customer
- Operations
- Making the product and delivering it
- Or delivering the service.
- Finance
- Managing the cash flow
- Understanding the financial reports such as the Balance Sheet and the Profit and Loss Account
- Legal entity
- What is your legal position in relation to your business and what protections do you have in place?
- Managing Staff
- Have you got experience of being a manager?
- Do you know the responsibilities you have when you employ a member of staff?
When you have determined your strengths and weaknesses you can decide which tasks you want to delegate and who to delegate those tasks to. Remember that even when you have delegated a task, the responsibility for it’s completion rests with you. As the sign on Harry S. Truman’s desk said “The buck stops here.”
In order to understand the issues raised above I can recommend reading Michael Gerber’s The E Myth.
The other option is to come to one of our workshops in which we cover all of the topics in the diagram or book a one to one session with our start-up specialist advisor Edward Tudor. You can contact Edward by email on Edward.tudor@hcbusinessadvisors.co.uk