4 Tips to Help Kickstart Your Start-up

With the economy finally picking up after the Great Recession, entrepreneurial activity is on the rise again.

After reaching a record low in 2010 with merely 326,091 startups, the number of new U.S. startups has climbed each year, reaching 415,226 in 2017, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. As the economic environment for start-ups improves, opportunities abound, but competition is also increasing.

To succeed among a growing number of competitors, you’ll need a solid strategy for growing your start-up. Here are four tips to help you kick-start your business.

Set up Your Smartphone for Mobile Operations

If you’re starting your business on a budget, your smartphone can serve as a mobile center of operations, saving you money on office space and allowing you to run your company from anywhere. A Google survey found that 9 out of 10 executives use their smartphones for business, and one in 10 even run their business exclusively from their smartphones. In order to do this, it’s essential that you choose a high-end smartphone with the right features.

For instance, the iPhone 7 has high-quality Retina Display to make it easy for you to see your business data on your phone, plus top-quality cameras for scanning business documents and carrying on video conversations, as well as strong security features such as Touch ID and encryption. Choosing a smartphone that makes it easy for you to manage your business can greatly improve your ability to run your daily operations.

Automate Your Operations for Efficiency

When you’re first starting your business, it’s important to minimize your expenses by maximizing your efficiency. One proven strategy for efficiency is automating routine business tasks so that you don’t have to spend as much time and money on them.

For example, if you use a cloud-based accounting program such as QuickBooks Online to manage your finances, you can sync it with other software to automate bookkeeping functions such as transaction reporting, expense reporting, payroll, inventory management, and tax preparation.

Popular apps such as QuickBooks Online often have APIs that make it easy for you to sync data with other programs like Harvest.

You can also use efficiency apps such as Zapier to create your own automated workflows. For instance, you can set a trigger so that whenever you get an email from a client with an attachment, the attachment gets copied to Dropbox and you receive an automated text notification. Automating routine tasks like this can save you precious time running your business.

Use Business Intelligence to Plan Your Marketing

In addition to minimizing your expenses, another key to a successful business launch is maximizing your profits. A good marketing plan is a key to achieving this. You can create a much more solid marketing plan if you use business intelligence tools to research your market and identify what your customer base wants instead of guessing.

You can also apply business intelligence to determine which of your marketing campaigns are working most effectively, what sources are driving traffic to your website, who’s buying your products, and what other products they’re interested in.

Today’s leading business intelligence tools such as Google Analytics and Microsoft Power BI are designed for self-service so you can easily create customized reports to analyze your marketing or other areas of your business.

Follow a Sales Strategy to Maximize Your Revenue

Along with solid marketing, maximizing your revenue requires a smart sales strategy. You will have the most success with your sales efforts if you map out the steps in your sales process, identifying how prospects progress through your sales funnel.

Map out every step from how your prospect arrives at your website to how they begin the sales presentation process to how they make a purchase. Include the post-purchase process so you can plan follow-up marketing opportunities to promote upselling and cross-sell purchases. You can automate your management of your sales process by adopting customer relationship management software such as Salesforce or SugarCRM that helps you track your customer sales interactions.

CRM software can also help you analyze your sales data so you can identify your hottest prospects and focus on your best sales opportunities.

Choose Wisely

A good smartphone gives you a mobile base of operations for expanding your business. Automation allows you to keep your costs low by increasing your efficiency. Marketing business intelligence combined with a sound sales strategy and CRM software helps you optimize your marketing and sales activity in order to maximize your revenue. Employing these strategies will help get your startup off to a productive, profitable launch.