Running a business is complicated, and there never seems to be enough time to get everything done. Especially in the beginning, so much time is spent getting your pricing right, setting up efficient marketing campaigns, and carefully balancing what’s coming in and going out, that it’s easy to neglect other important, but longer-term factors that determine your ultimate success.
Building a business isn’t just about ticking over day-to-day – it’s also about planning for the future, predicting where you’re heading in five to ten years, and making adjustments so that you continue to remain on the right track.
In this article, you’ll learn about the most important factors for securing your business for years to come.
Reassessing Your Vision
Every business starts with a vision – it’s something that you spend a lot of time developing in the early stages to determine the fundamental whys and hows. Your business vision will have guided you each step of the way in honing your product or service, but did you take the time to account for the future?
If not, your core ideas could do with some reassessment. The areas you should look at most closely are those relating to your overall mission: what do you hope your product or service will achieve, and how do you expect/want it to evolve? If you’ve made financial predictions and forecasts for the next year, how do these look over the next two or three?
Scrutinize each decision you make in regard to both short and long-term goals.
Open a Business Savings Account
One of the very first things you should do when you start your business is open a business savings account: ideally, this should be done at the same time as opening your general business account, but you can do it retroactively – the important thing is that you start saving right away.
A business savings account provides many functions. Fundamentally, it offers a lifeline should you run into a period of financial hardship: there’s no telling what might happen in the future, but having some money kept back offers security so that you can get back on your feet.
It’s also a great way to accumulate funds for general upgrades, building expansion, and anything else you might need to improve your business over time. There often isn’t enough spare cash floating around for these kinds of investments, but a savings account gives you those opportunities to grow.
The Importance of Risk Management
Making sure you’re implementing proper risk management strategies and practices is something that you should start as soon as possible. There are a myriad of things that can go wrong when you run a business, some of which can seriously hurt people, so it’s essential to properly assess risk both at the beginning and at regular intervals.
To name but a few categories, there are cybersecurity matters, supply chain issues, staffing challenges, and public safety to consider, and there may be others that apply specifically to your line of work. Do some further research to discover what applies to you, and systematically work through it to ensure you’re mitigating any future problems.
Planning and Budgeting
You’ll have had to do some planning and budgeting to get started, and if you’re at the point where you’re already running your business, you should have a good idea by now of where your figures lie.
That said, just because you understand where you’re heading in the short term doesn’t mean you’re secure for the future. Review your financial statements and cash flow data regularly, and always be on the lookout for ways you can improve things; budgeting software can help a great deal in this regard, enabling users to intuitively plan out a ‘road map’ and get general estimates for big future milestones.
You should also always be on the lookout for any cost-saving opportunities: this is a broad topic in and of itself, but many businesses are wasting money in small, often unnoticeable ways, so it can be beneficial to conduct regular financial surveys to get a better handle on things.
Leveraging Technology
Technology is advancing all areas of life forward at an unprecedented rate, and so naturally, there are many tools you can leverage in the business world, too.
There’s plenty of tech that can help you reduce costs and improve efficiency. CRM (customer relationship management) packages are a great place to start, as they offer a flexible, centralized system for managing all of your customer sales data and relationships in one place.
Then, there are the many innovations driven by artificial intelligence (AI) – something the world is only just scratching the surface with. AI offers numerous potential benefits for its ability to quickly perform deep data analysis, enabling you to identify trends and target your marketing more efficiently than ever before. By very nature, these AI analytics tools are designed to puzzle through the bigger questions that dictate your continued success over time.
Developing Your Brand Identity
Brand identity is something a lot of businesses struggle with. While you might have found it relatively easy to come up with a great product or service, determining how you’re going to fashion it into something your target audience actually wants is where the real challenge lies.
Your brand identity encompasses many different elements, from your logo to the type of wording you use to convey your message. Importantly, how well your brand resonates with your customers is going to be critical for ensuring strong customer retention over the years to come; revisit how your brand is shaping up every couple of months or so, and leverage insights gleaned from your data analysis to ensure you are targeting your customers with pinpoint accuracy.
Understanding Customer Relationships
CRM platforms have already been discussed in point number 5, but building customer relationships is more than simply using a piece of software.
Having a loyal customer base is the cornerstone of keeping your business running over the long term; as you continually funnel new customers into your overall plan, you should always be simultaneously working on nurturing your relationship with existing ones. When you satisfy a customer over a long period of time, they spread the word about the quality of your products and services, and customer testimony carries a huge amount of weight so far as generating interest.
Customer engagement is crucial in this regard. Don’t become a faceless entity: use all available channels such as your website, social media accounts, and in-person events to speak to your potential buyers and encourage them to invest in your ideas.
Why Employee Development Matters
If you employ staff to help with the day-to-day running of your business, they’ll need nurturing – both for your benefit and for theirs.
When you employ staff, you want to make sure you’re providing them with opportunities to grow and learn. The best staff are those who enjoy working for you and stay at the business for many years, and the more highly skilled your workforce, the better you can innovate over time.
As their leader, there will be a lot you can teach them on your own, so invest time in them. If you can afford it, it can also be a good idea to offer chances to enroll in courses that will develop their career, or find seminars in the area or online that would be useful to them.
Don’t Forget About Legal Compliance
Don’t forget about the legal requirements you need to fulfill. This should be something you sort both at the beginning and re-assess periodically to make sure nothing has changed (both in terms of your own personal circumstances or alterations within a given legal framework).
There are special regulations for certain industries and universal laws governing tax and best practices, so it’s a good idea to contact a legal advisor who specializes in business law to perform a thorough assessment and ensure everything is above board.
Consider What Will Happen When You Step Down
And finally, there’s the really long-term stuff to think about – what will happen when you step down?
While this topic may seem so far off that you don’t need to think about it, it always pays to consider what will happen to your business when you’re gone. This is usually something people contemplate when they’re at least a few years in, but considering it in the beginning is a good exercise for practicing your long-term planning skills.
If you’re hiring staff, think carefully about the sort of team you’re building and how it would operate if you weren’t there; puzzle over the role each person in your organization plays. This exercise can help you decide how to adapt and restructure, even if you’re nowhere near the point of retirement.
Wrapping Up
Running a successful business requires that you constantly have your finger on the pulse: you’ll find yourself spinning many different plates at once in the early stages, but providing you spend enough time make sure you’ve organized things properly, you’ll be appropriately prepared for what’s to come in the future. Good luck!
