I've been discovering some very interesting tools and features available for free on the web that can be broadly explored and can bring some good positive impact for your company. I'm not talking only about tools for online marketing, but also for project management and for customer relationship management, for example. But along with this, I want to bring to you some tips of how to learn to use these features and how to connect them to have a better experience.
Please. Please don't think this is a complete guide about how to start and run a business. Not really. It's just some insights and comments about some key points I see as fundamental. So... Read it, yes; stop here, no. Expand the topics I'll cover, and apply them to your own reality.
This will be a series of articles posted throughout this and the next week, so check for updates regularly, cool? :)
Before you start it, plan it
I've been talking for a while about the importance of having a strategy before you start running anything (from your career to your website or your business). Things don't happen from day to night, so results might take some time to show up and you might have to stick to your strategic plan during moments of uncertainty. Sometimes you may feel like walking in the dark, except for this small, simple and powerful thing guiding your way: your strategic plan.
It's here where you bring all the action plans, ideas, paths and data to guide your business. To build a business plan is more about the effort than anything else. I mean... It's not a complex tool: it's just a template you have to fill with information. All those books of hundreds of pages about "how to make your own business plan" are bullshit, and you may be spending money (and time) reading them. In three steps, build a business plan is:
Sketch the idea of your business.
This includes the mission, the vision and the values of your organization. The mission states basically why you exist. Why does your organization is unique and necessary to the world? The vision states what you are and what you will become. And the values state how your company runs, the guidelines, the ethics and the moral. All these three points need to be very well defined. If not, it's like going to sail without a map. It will look like you are doing any progress (your boat is moving forward), but you don't know where you are going.
Besides this, you will have to define your target market. It looks simple, but it's not: how do they act? What are their preferences? What do they like? And what do they not? How to find this information? Well, this is part of the challenge: it depends on your business' product. If you are an investment company, it's pretty easy to find public information about companies in the stock market. But if you are an organization that deals with common people (let's say, a clothing store), you may have some hard time describing your customers' behavior. Cool. You have your goals, you defined your customers, you have mission, vision and values. Nice. So what? Let the real fun begin...
After the sketch, you will deal with the resources to start.
Thinking from zero, what do you need? And my favorite part: how can you do it with less? Of course... Anyone can put loads of money and run a company, but the real challenge is to find a way to do more with less. An example? Physical structure. Why do I say this? Nowadays we have this thing called Cloud Computing, which stands for an online environment that keeps your data, softwares, etc. (but mainly data). What does it mean? That you won't need a big dark room filled with servers to run your business. You can find online (and sometimes free) online tools to do it.
Everyone always (and I mean everyone, and I mean always) want to create a good first impression. So you build a great office, with expensive furniture, in a good neighborhood, paying very high prices for it. Prices you can't afford with the income of your company because, well... You still don't have it. So that's pretty simple: keep things simple (yes, repetition intended). Stop with your megalomaniac syndrome and learn one thing: good foundation and good structure are not synonym of lots of money. And vice versa: lots of money don't mean good foundation...
Have planned everything for your business? Are you ready to start? No!
After these two first things, you will have to think how your organization will survive and grow.
This is basically how your money initially spent will generate more money. And here you can divide in two (usually they say three, but i disagree... there is no need for middle-term) moments:
- Short-term: What if I told you... The short and long-term strategies are not about time. "What?" Yes. Short-term is how you will operate your business on a daily, weekly, monthly and even annually basis. How will you reach your customers? How will you deal with your staff? And with your stuff? These three simple questions cover your main concerns: Marketing, Human Resources and Finances.
- Long-term: This is not about creating a strategy for many years in the future... This long-term thing is much more about flexibility than any other thing. Let's say a new technology emerges tomorrow: how will you adapt to it? How is your company structure so you can not only absorb this new technology but also learn how to use and how to master it? It's extremely hard to predict how the political-economic-social-technological scenario will look like in the future (doesn't matter if we are talking about one, two or ten years), so it's almost useless to create a detailed action plan for the future based on the present circumstances.
Drawing these two strategies is very important: you will need to run both of them in parallel, so your business can grow consistently. That's why the vast majority of companies have the strategic and the operational sectors. The short-term can be thought in terms of operations. The long-term doesn't involve too much operations, but much more strategic thinking.
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