New Entrepreneurs Small Business Advice

Starting a small business in today's economic climate takes 'guts'

. It is hard enough during times of plenty to get a small business up and running profitably but during times of economic uncertainty, it takes extreme confidence, thorough research and a preparedness to work through problems consistently. If this is you, then you will probably do very well indeed.

If you are thinking of a retail outlet in a street or in a strip mall, then spend some time in your vehicle over various times during the next few weeks and check out the busier days and the amount of shopping traffic. Not just vehicles passing by in the street because these aren't shoppers. You will notice a big difference in times and days of the week.

Some days in a retail business are definitely days when you need all hands working. The customers won't wait forever to be served so you will need enough staff on hand to service their needs. Some days, these super-busy times may be just for a few hours over a lunch break but you will still need to meet their needs promptly because they will not have any time to stand around and wait for service.

Another thing you will need to know is the old retail adage of "location, location, location". This is the mantra of every retail outlet because if you get it wrong, you will have shot yourself in the kneecaps. You need good passing traffic (that is, pedestrian traffic) and you need adequate car parking facilities.

Without the exposure of a good location for your retail business you will find your advertising costs rapidly rising which eats into profitability very fast. And there are no guarantees when it comes to successful advertising. Just spending dollars to keep your business name in front of people's attention, is not the way to run a profitable small business.

If you are investigating opening up a service based business, then you will need a different type of location. The last thing you want for this type of business is to be paying high rent costs for a valuable location because you will not be depending on walk-in customers.

If your rent is too high a percentage of your income, then you will find it extremely difficult to be profitable. Without making adequate profit, the viability for a successful small service based business decreases significantly.

If your business is a mixture of both retail (that is, you do have physical products) to sell and you offer a service as well, then you will need to know where the majority of your clientele comes from.Most businesses are a mixture of both as even if you are a service based business like a plumbing business or electrician, it is a good business practice to also offer a physical product in line with your trade, to the general public.

In today's world there are a lot of DIY'ers who insist they can do everything as well as a tradesperson, and often can, so you need to be able to sell them something if you aren't able to sell them on using your services.

If it's any consolation, when I ran my small home maintenance business, my busiest days were usually on a Monday or especially the day following a long week-end, we used to get a lot of calls to come and fix DIY'ers mistakes. By this time a small job had often been turned into a much larger one.

A sustainable small business will require good profit margins on both the retail and service based aspects of your business without overloading either and gaining a reputation of being too expensive to use.

by: Jan Smith

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