Finally, you have started your new business and ready to set your identity in this vast blue ocean.
Right?
Congratulations for the great fortune ahead!
Unfortunately, 21.5% of the startups fail in the first year itself. To avoid such failure, entrepreneurs should consider some initial steps to make their business sustainable and profitable.
Here in this article, we are going to discuss the important business strategies needed for startup company growth. This would be helpful to reach your goal.
Let’s explore…
Define your Startup Business
The initial step for a Startup is to define your Business. What is it all about?
What kind of products or services you’re going to sell.
How you are going to deliver your products or services. Whether it is an offline or online business or it can be both.
It is important to have a little knowledge and experience in your area and is more apparent to define what kind of business you wanted to start with.
Which type of business and ownership you are planned to do, like
- Sole Proprietorship
- Partnership
- Corporation and
- Limited Liability Company
Purpose of the Business
The main purpose of a business is not only to make a profit but to offer a good value to the customer at the nominal price.
Absolutely, every business owner wants to maximize the profits, as it involves many aspects like stakeholders, investors, etc…
At the same time, you should know about corporate social responsibility.
But,
Besides everything, it should solve the big problem in the marketplace.
Problem-solving is crucial because it creates interest among the customers and helps you to gain a competitive advantage over your competitors.
Vision, Mission, and Goals
After you are clear with the business plan, it’s time to state your Vision, Mission, and Goal as a part of business strategies.
“If you want to reach a goal, you must “see the reaching” in your own mind before you actually arrive at your goal.” – Zig Ziglar
Vision
Prepare a detailed document for your vision and mission of your company as a business owner with your startup team.
Creating a business vision is vital as it states what you aspire to become at a particular point in time in the future.
It should be written in an elegant way that could motivate you and your employees in achieving the goals. This would be the driving factor for most entrepreneurs whenever they step down.
Mission
Having written your vision statement you should state what kind of operations you are likely to do at present and tomorrow.
Keep it concise by describing the competitive advantage with the quality of your product or service and customer satisfaction level. This should match the purpose of your organization.
Goals
Define a short term and long term goal for your company and be determined to attain that.
It is as easy to set the short term goal that you could achieve in 6-12 months.
But for a startup business, you need to put more effort and time to define your long-term goals because it will include a timeframe of 5 years.
This could also be done a little later after you achieve your short term goals and after the good establishment of your business.
Identify your Target Audience
To run a successful start-up, you have to find a customer or end-user for your product or service.
You have to identify your target audience considering the following aspects
- Gender
- Married or unmarried
- Children or adult
- Educated or uneducated
Your product or service should be more relevant to your customer by providing more variables of meeting their needs, and problems.
For that purpose, a ground analysis should be done seeking different perceptions of different groups of people.
Try to get opinions from a large number of people, through
- Conducting Surveys
- Doing Market Research.
An important key factor you need to determine from the research process is the Buyer persona. It is the fictional representation of your ideal customer that tells the behavior and intent of them.
Do Competitive Research
Having identified your target audience you cannot go blindly to market approach and customization of your product or service.
Beware of your competitors who have already set a benchmark in your kind of business and runs their business successfully.
Although you could find your style of doing business after analyzing your competitor’s strengths, weakness, and market approach.
Try to learn from your competitors and simultaneously try to focus on the areas where they lack and stand as an ideal for your customers.
You should know some of the tools and frameworks to analyze your competitor and your performance as well.
Tools and Framework
After setting out your business model, and your product or service, eventually you must start analyzing the business performance using some of the tools and frameworks like
- SWOT Analysis
- PESTEL Analysis
- Porter’s Five Forces
- Value chain analysis
- VRIO Framework
Value Proposition
Analyzing the value proposition is important for every business person to make their business more sustainable.
Literally, it tells about your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). It should be different from your competitors.
Identify that key differentiating factor that would create demand for your customer to reach you. If the customer gets satisfied with the product you deliver, then it will lead your business to grow in the long-term.
Key Performance Indicators
Growth prospects of all businesses cannot be determined at the earlier stages of a startup company.
After you kickstart your business, measuring some of the key performance indicators would be essential for the growth of the company. This tells whether you are directing your business on the right path.
While progressing, every founder of the business should always keep tracking these KPIs by investing some money in it, so that it will help to fix the targets. KPIs that you may need to know are
- Growth in Revenue
- Net Profit Margin
- Customer Satisfaction Score
- Percentage Of Market Share
- Employee Churn Rate
( It varies with the type of business you are doing )
Building a Startup Team
Building a strong Startup team act as a pillar to take off the business to a higher level.
All the members of your team should have a shared vision to thrive your business. This should match the skills needed for your work in all departments.
Every person in a team should be a subject matter expert in their respective fields or departments.
Creating a proper corporate hierarchy structure and distributing the responsibilities among the members creates order and value in the company.
The core team for your startup company includes
- Co-Founder
- Chief Executive Officer
- Product Manager
- Sales Manager
- Marketing Manager
- Web Developers
- Auditor
- HR Manager
Hiring an Employee As A Business Strategy
Hiring a potential employee and integrating them from different departments to work for your operational decisions is another important task for your team.
Unlike any other resources, human resources must be given more preference by giving them appropriate costs and allowances.
An employer should also consider their work- personal life balance.
You cannot ignore some HR basics such as onboarding, team structure, training & development, and compliance which strengthens employer-employee relations.
Maintaining peace and making sure all the employees are happy in their workplace is more essential. As they are going to shape the future of your business.
Finance Management
Money is a crucial part of any business.
There arise a lot more questions on how to deal with money.
Show your diligence in identifying the potentials to make a profit, only then you could invest money on valuable resources and allocating the same.
Managing the accounts, bills, payments for your entire business process, with little effort ensures in determining the financial projections.
Do a comprehensive analysis of some key factors before you start investing.
- Capital investments
- Investors
- Overhead Expenses
- Sales forecast
- Cash flow
- Legal document
- Break-even
Reader’s Insight:
Let us know if we missed out on anything in this article business strategies for startups and share your thoughts in the comment section.
