BUSINESS

6 Fresh-Squeezed Tips for Running a Small Business in Orlando

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According to one study, about 20% of small businesses will fail within the first year. If you are starting a business in Florida and want to make sure that it goes past that first year, you might be wondering what you can do to make sure that it keeps running.  Thankfully, we have all the best tips for running a small business, so make sure you keep reading!

1. Register Your Company

One of the first things you’ll need to do before anything else is registering your company.  If you’re starting it in Florida, you can go to the SunBiz website and find most of the forms that you can fill out and upload online.  There are fees to file these, but the breakdown of all the fees can be found on the Florida Department of State website. However, make sure that you file all of them and pay the fees, otherwise, you could have bigger legal problems later on down the road. If you aren’t sure you’ve checked all the legal boxes, you should also consider hiring a lawyer who can guide you through the process.

2. Set Performance Indicators

Once you have all the legal paperwork out of the way, you can start building your business. One thing to help you set the foundation is to make sure that you set performance indicators or goals. You can start setting these by researching the market. You’ll need an idea of who your customer will be, what competition is out there, how fast you think you can grow, and which way you think the market will trend. You should start with four main goals: product, promotion, place, and price.  Once you have these goals set, you can start to build every aspect of your business around those foundational goals.

3. Write a Plan

Once you have your goals set, start writing a plan for your business. This will help you get organized, but it can also help you get funding as well.

In order to have a good business plan, you should focus on a few main things including financial planning, sales, marketing, product development, and the people.

4.  Secure Funding

Whether you’re starting a business in Florida or some other state, you’ll always find a few options to get funding. For example, you could try applying for small business loans, credit cards, short-term loans, or even try crowdfunding on a site like GoFundMe.

However, if you are in Florida, you can always reach out to the Florida Small Business Development Center as well. There, they will give you free financial advising if you’re a new entrepreneur. They will also offer a council on how much funding they think that you’ll need.

5. Hire Employees

Once you’ve gotten some kind of funding, you’ll need to start hiring people. Even if you wanted to run your business yourself, it wouldn’t be possible.  If you don’t have the resources to hire your own team, you can always outsource the work as well and pay by the hour for whatever you need. There are many contractors out there that can help you.  In the beginning, you’ll likely start out with a small budget, but you still want to make sure you attract the best talent. Find people who are experts in areas that you know nothing about. The more diverse of a team you have, the more likely it is that your business will keep running.

You should ask your team to be involved in decisions around the company and ask them for their input. However, you’ll also need to set up a human resources department to protect yourself and your business as well. Make sure that you come up with a formal onboarding process and find a way to measure each employee’s success. When you have these systems in place from the beginning, you can easily fix them and scale them for when your business grows down the line.

However, make sure that you treat your employees fairly in the beginning. If you treat your employees wrong or overload them with work, they’ll likely leave your company and spread the word to other potential new hires.

6. Build a Platform

Lastly, you can use your new team to help you start building a platform. This should be your website, social media presence, emails, digital ads, and SEO, but you should focus on one of them at a time. If you want to get them all done now, you can always outsource projects as well.  For example, if you need new SEO content, find an Orlando SEO company to help you create content. Make sure that you also have a marketing team to consult with on your brand’s tone, design, personality, and branding. You’ll need to figure this out first to make sure that your brand is consistent on all of the platforms.

Once you’ve figured that out, you’ll need to do research on your target customer. Once you figure out your target customer, you can start doing SEO and keyword research so that you can spend your time marketing directly to them.

Discover More Tips for Running a Small Business

These are only a few things to keep in mind when running a small business, but there are many more things to consider!. We know that figuring out how to start a business in Florida can be overwhelming, but we’re here to help you out to start a business. If you enjoyed this article, make sure that you explore our website to find more articles just like this one.

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