Going Into Business For Yourself? Make Sure You Have This Fab 4 On Speed Dial
There’s nothing quite as frustrating as being stuck in a day job you despise. When you work hard for long hours and never see a single pay rise or even a smile of recognition from your manager it can be enough to make you want to rethink your entire career. Although you apply for other jobs whenever you can spare a moment in your sparse free time or your meagre lunch break, the job market is so busy and competitive that your applications go unacknowledged and it can feel like you’ll be stuck in a dead end job forever.
Many a bright and capable person has been stuck in this rut and they’ve started up their own businesses to haul themselves out of it. While this may be a great way to assert yourself, stake your claim in the vital and economically important world of small business, it’s important to remember that no entrepreneur is an island. When you have limited time and resources, it’s important to realise that you can’t do everything by yourself. As conscious as you may be of cutting costs and limiting overheads, these fab 4 deserve a place on your speed dial.
A great accountant
Your first two years of trading are all important and it would be a crying shame if you were to navigate them only for your business to be capsized by an enormous tax bill because you didn’t fill out your self assessment forms properly or didn’t claim for all of the myriad expenses that go with starting a business simply because you didn’t know you could. The best thing you can do is get a checking account that you will be exclusively using for business expenses so as to closely monitor them, as well as your budget and taxes. Hire an accountant like the accounts lab who have special packages designed to aid startups as well as provide help in small business tax preparation.
A bookkeeper
Your early months of forex trading online are an incredibly steep learning curve and you’ll likely be spinning so many plates that you simply don’t have time for keeping records. Unfortunately, failing to collate this data can cost you valuable strategic insight. You can over invest in areas that aren’t paying dividends or under invest in areas that could actually lead to growth. A bookkeeper usually only needs about 1 day a month to work their magic but the data they provide can really help put you in the driving seat of your business rather than shooting in the dark. Keeping the budget balanced at first can be an issue, so relying on tools at your disposal like accounts receivable financing for businesses can help you keep the ball rolling until things get steady.
A digital marketing agency
Many of today’s entrepreneurs are very digitally savvy and this may lead them to believe that they can manage all of their marketing efforts on their own. While it may be true that you can manage your own marketing, this doesn’t necessarily mean you should. With so many plates to spin, your duty should be to focus solely on the managing of your business. A digital marketing agency will help you to create an individualised plan to boost your search engine rankings and organically draw new interest to your business while building your brand. Marketing offers one of the best ROI ratios of any capital investment you could make.
An outsourced HR service provider
If you’re employing staff to facilitate your business, they have rights that you’re legally obliged to meet. Despite your best intentions, unless you outsource to a dedicated HR provider you could inadvertently contravene HR legislation. This could not only sour your working relations with your employees, it could also toxify your brand. HR is a complex and thorny issue and while there’s no law saying that you can’t do it yourself, it would require a lot of research and administration which you can ill afford.