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Thinking of starting your own business? You are not the only one who wants to start a business but lack the knowledge. If you have been an employee all your life, starting a business can be very different. It may seem so cool to own your own business, but there are business tasks to take care. Here you get to learn some of the critical stuff about starting a business.
Distribution channel
You decided on your business. You decided on your products. The question is how do you get your products to your customers? Many business owners fall into this trap; they sensed a good product, but they have no idea how to distribute it.
There are number of ways to distribute a product. Wholesale, retail, direct sales, online sales are some examples of distribution.
Costing of the product is different in each channel. For example in wholesale, selling price of the product is low; you make money by selling in quantity. Then in direct sales, you got to factor the commission for your salespeople.
Choose a method, work out the costing. This is the bare minimum that you must know. There is a lot more in depth study when you move into any one of them.
Target market
Knowing your target market can save you tons of money. Your must understand that you can't possibly sell to everyone. There will be some who loves you, some who doesn't care and some who hates you. Your job is to find out who loves you and take good care of them. To expand, you also got to find those who doesn't care and convert them. You can't do anything about those who hates you.
Knowing you marketing allows you to focus your marketing on those who will give the best response. In any business, pin point your target market, you want to focus your effort on the most responsive group.
Marketing medium
Any businesses will require a certain amount of marketing. If you start a business, you would want to have exposure to your business. So how do you expose your company? What are the types of marketing medium would you want to leverage on?
TV advertising, newspaper advertisement, direct mailer, fliers in letterbox or magazine advertisement is one of the medium that you may want to consider. Of course there are more than what had been mentioned.
You must consider carefully with the kind of medium for your business. Not all business is effective using TV advertisement. Consider them carefully to save your marketing dollar.
Yourself
How well do you know yourself? What are you good at? What are your weaknesses? Like I said earlier, running a business is very different from working for others. When working for others you mainly take care of your job scope, while running a business, you take care of many other scopes.
If you are hiring as an IT engineer, you do only IT stuff in the company. If you start an IT company, then you take care of manpower, sales and marketing, operation etc. It requires a different set of skills and character.
Understanding your strengths and weaknesses can effectively help you in allocating tasks. If you are weak in accounting, you hire or outsource this area to someone else, so you can focus on sales. You wouldn't want to spend your time doing tasks that you are not good with, in the end waste too much time on those tasks.
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