The Value of a Business Start-Up

More and more home-based and new-business start-ups are realizing that they need to budget themselves even though they haven’t yet achieved commercial success.

With all the news media constantly touting business start-ups as the next big thing (read: money to burn to the tune of £500,000 a week) they’re busier than ever – they quote spending averages of £150 a week.

A good business start-up will need to be aware of the value they need to place on their expenses before disaster is a likely outcome. Indeed, they should be aware of this in the very beginning anyway.

The first response to the question is usually an answer along the lines of: ‘well it’s no cost really.’  We’re not really talking about ‘no cost’ in the traditional sense of the word.  We’re talking about paying for something that could be seen as a bargain to anyone else, but potentially not to you pocket.

For example, you could be in a new business start-up that’s currently involved in a niche area of your existing business.  The need to ramp-up involvement within this area could provide some opportunities of additional private time to invest in your business because that is a vertical area that you don’t currently occupy.

But if you’ve gone down the path of bypassing asking what spending from that area – particularly for advertising you could be handily skipping the question – you could be getting away with skipping the ideal question altogether.

Let’s imagine you have an existing online business that is synonymous with the key market, but particularly out of favor within it.

You’ve found a brilliant new niche area and you’re developing the areas to support new business development. As a new business, you don’t have most of the hurdles of having a physical presence or paying rent of offices.  But, as new businesses, you need to think persistently about what advertising saves you money.

This is to expose your business to consumers who may not be aware of your area or of your new brand. And it’s expensive to do this through traditional advertising means – which means changing the way you think.

This type of ‘no cost marketing’ is particularly tempting for ‘new businesses’ that don’t want to buy in to the carefulness and planning associated with traditional advertising.

If you’re equipped with a little entrepreneurial spirit (and that means only doing things you enjoy doing), you could swap low cost advertising for direct marketing.

Direct marketing refers to activities where you make sure your message is ‘inverted’ to consumers who’ve shown an interest in your market (typically through the use of email or participating in online forums).  By changing this specific information to a message that is attractive in itself, it will be a maximised efficiency when delivered (think of SPAM mail).

Now imagine you’ve reversed the message in your ‘in inverted pyramid’ into a message which is ‘inverted’ to your target market. You make sure that your message is ‘inverted’ to your prospects – because if it is invert in your prospects’ eyes, they could get the message and take that action.

This is a far more targeted and efficient way of influencing your prospects’ behaviour – it will cost far less, too. It will cost less because your message isn’t ‘inverted’ and more importantly, your message stays next to your prospects’ minds more – resulting in more targeted and more concise exposure.

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