Once you are a few weeks in, and only after you find you beat your plan assumptions every week look at revising your plan for growth.

Be warned, many businesses go bust growing too fast. It is called ‘over trading’ because your customers take longer to pay than you must pay for your costs the growth requires more cash than anyone will lend you. It is therefore vital to model your growth and your cash flow.

The secret to growth is a sales model and, more importantly, a sales funnel. Sales is like a production line, creating demand, making contacts, nurturing contacts, getting orders from people who WANT to buy. It is not about pushing stuff no one wants.

There is plenty of advice from virtually all of the contacts on our 'FRIENDS' tab.

New Start Businesses

It’s a lonely place. Get friends as soon as possible. There are many business networking groups which are cheap to attend where you will find many other business owners who will share experiences. Networking is a skill, however, it is just like social networking. Do not come on too strong, do not try to sell too soon, ask the people you meet to tell you about themselves and their business and how you might help them. If you do this first, they will soon reciprocate and ask you about your business. Always have an objective, the first objective will be to find yourself a mentor. The next objective is to find people who can connect you with potential customers, normally people will want to get to know you before they trust you to connect with their friends.

Find customers, minimise risk, understand what is happening, continuously update your plan, these are your priorities.

New start businesses are almost always; short of time; short of skill; short of money. There are creative ways round all of these issues, for example, for the things that take you a lot of time and you may not be very good at, get someone else to do them. Often you can find someone to swap skills with. Always, you can buy in just an hour or two of someone skilled. Never, do badly what some other person can do well. The biggest danger is making yourself too busy doing, often struggling to do, and spending too little time on your priorities (see previous paragraph). In corporate life, managers are advised to ‘always hire people better than yourself, they will help push you up’. It is no different in your own business, apply the thinking to outsourced help and fire yourself from jobs you are not good at.

Watch you cash every week. Renew your cash forecast every week. If you want to know what it feels like for a business to be short of cash, just hold your breath for 10 minutes. You won’t make it, and neither will your business.

Sources of advice for New Start and many other business support topics can be found on the 'FRIENDS' tab.

Case Studies

We are preparing some case studies, please share yours, we will happily help your publicity.