Beginner Small Business Tips for Success
Our small business tips have been assembled to help you grow your own business. No matter what industry you are in, these tips can be applied to help you maximize what your business is capable of.
Unlike more generic business tips you will find online, our small business tips are heavily shaped by our personal experiences. Growing our photography business into something successful has been a long road. This road has been paved with many highs and lows. We’ve created this article to help put some of what we have learned to good use helping our readers get more from their small businesses.
Start a Business Around Something You Love
The businesses most likely to succeed are those built around a product or service you are really passionate about.
As we mentioned in our intro, we are professional photographers. Our passion for photography and capturing beautiful moments for the people we work for has been something that has driven us through even the toughest times.
On top of that, running a business itself is pretty exciting at times. We often learn things as we go. And one of the most exciting parts as you begin to pick up steam is seeing that people are actually willing to pay you for what you offer.
Understand the Risks
Having a small business is rewarding when things are going well, and very hard when it isn’t. We have experienced a roller coaster of emotions on our journey of running a business. Almost everything involved will require some amount of risk from you. While the payoff can be great, it is never guaranteed. Some of the things we have personally experienced include:
- Financial strain as we made investments into our business
- Missing out on spending time with family/friends
- Having no time for hobbies we enjoy
- Concern that things won’t work out over the long term
We speak from a position of doing well, but others are not as fortunate. More dramatic risks associated with running a small business unsuccessfully include:
- Having to file bankruptcy due to too much debt
- Advancing technology making your business irrelevant
- Having to return to a 9-5 day job
- The feeling of failure…
The risks are always the toughest to talk about, but important to be aware of. Ultimately, we view our business as a gamble – but one that has been worth it. And for us, it’s paying off well – not just financially, but in allowing us more freedom that just can’t be found working somewhere else.
Keep Your Day Job in the Start Up Phase
One of the biggest reasons why small businesses fail is because they run out of money (we know…it’s hard to believe!). While not easy, keeping your day job while you start up your business will allow you to have a steady stream of funds that you can use to support your business and personal welfare.
This is a point that really hits home with us, as we have worked full time jobs while running our photography business. For over 2 years, we have done this – and while extremely hard at times, it has allowed us to have financial independence and security.
If you take this approach, any unnecessary spending should be put on hold and save money for the time you are able to break away and run your business exclusively. Having a solid savings will provide you with a great foundation for making it through any unforeseen slow seasons.
Maintain Your Personal Health Goals
This might seem strange to feature in a list of small business tips, but it’s actually very important. One of the downsides of running a business AND working a day job is it begins to take a serious toll on your health. As we write this, we’re coming away from our high season, which has lasted around 4 months. In this timeframe, we’ve been working easily 100 hour weeks without a single day off.
In this time, we’ve lost a lot of weight and mentally feel not entirely there. It’s been frustrating because we’ve lacked energy and time to maintain our normally healthy lifestyles.
While this sort of sacrifice is manageable for a short term window, it definitely is not long term. We highly suggest maintaining your personal health through the process of starting a business. As you become busier, it becomes increasingly important to carve out time for exercise and eating right.
You can, of course, help streamline some of this by making your own home gym so you don’t even have to take time to drive to one. Using food delivery services, you can remove the need to go to the grocery store as well.
Find a Mentor
No matter what industry you are setting a business up in, it’s always ideal to learn from someone who is already experienced. You’re mentor doesn’t necessarily have to be in the same industry as a lot of their input about running a business will be transferable.
As photographers, learning through others as essential to us growing our business and skill sets. Early on, we would shadow other wedding photographers as assistants and second shooters. This allowed us to learn the ropes of photographing weddings without having to commit all of our own time and resources.
If you’re having trouble finding a real life person to mentor you, don’t worry. We’ll discuss these things more later in this post, but there is enough educational resources online that you can self-educate using free and paid web content.
Know Your Competition
Every small business will face competition. Unless you are one of the first companies on the scene of a never-before-seen industry, kind of like MySpace was at the advent of social media, you are not going to be the only player.
As photographers, we’ve knew going into our business that we work in a highly saturated industry. Pretty much everyone is a photographer these days.
The most important thing we’ve learned? Just because things are competitive doesn’t mean it’s impossible to succeed. However, you will need to be prepared to do what it takes to carve out your own little slice of the market share. This is what we’ve done in photography, and it’s what you can do in whatever industry you’re working in!
Get Organized
Organization is one of many broad small business tips that we’ll expound upon throughout this article. There are many ways to be organized. At it’s core, “organization” is something you need to act upon. It requires your actions to get organized and stay organized. A lot of businesses end up failing because they never had this basic structure – so it’s an important first step to take from day 1.
Keep Detailed Records
Ah…record keeping. Probably the most exciting business thing we get to do. Sarcasm aside – keeping detailed records is essential. We keep logs on our clients, file away contracts and invoices, information about our suppliers and third party services, and so on.
Be Creative
Your creative ingenuity will be what helps to separate you from other business providers. While at face value, some industries may not come across as requiring of a lot of creativity, this is always something that is needed.
Creativity is often associated with an artistic sense. For us as photographers, this is an easy enough analogy to grasp as our art is the product that literally defines our business. But, the real creativity of our small business is how we make it work without a large profit margin. How we manage our cash flow. In being creative, most people probably won’t even see it in action. But, it’s one of those bread-and-butter features of all good businesses – big or small.
Stay Focused
The ability to maintain your concentration and “stay the course” is one of the things that will determine if you can take your business the distance. This is especially true when you face difficult times.
This is something we like talking about a lot. In the context of our business, we’ve maintained our focus for several years. We certainly have down days where we think things are not going well. It can be frustrating during our slow season when there is hardly any money rolling in. But it’s at these times that we hunker down the most. We go hard on our marketing efforts, hone our personal skills, and take care of things that we neglect when we are busy.
Be Ready to Make Sacrifices
The most resonate small business tips that we have lived heavily in the past few years has been this one. Our business has been built on sacrifices of all types. We’ve made sacrifices that have led to limited abilities to do things we’d rather be doing in the hope that we are investing in a better future for ourselves. We have missed out on seeing friends and family. And we’ve given up a lot of money in exchange for photography gear and business products that we need to run our business. The list goes on and on.
Set Up a Legal Business Entity
There are several business types to select from. We’ve noted a few of these here:
- Sole Proprietorship
- Limited Liability Company (LLC)
- S Corporation (S Corp)
- Corporation
By default, sole proprietorship status is attributed to every single person business. There is paperwork filing to make this official, but the legal system treats people as this simple classification by default as well. In truth, this business status offers little in the way of protection for you, and is not ideal.
Setting up an LLC is likely the preferred option – and the choice we went with. There are some great advantages that come with starting an LLC, most significantly the limited liability of you (as an individual) for things done by the business. For example, if you were to be sued for actions taken by your photography business, only your business assets would be vulnerable – not your personal assets.
Larger companies may elect to set up as a corporation. We most commonly associate companies like Wal-Mart and Target this this business type because they take full advantage of the corporation legal benefits.
Schedule Out Your Work Day
One of the easiest ways to get organized in practice is by scheduling out your day.
This can be as specific or loose as you want it to be.
Below are 2 different work day schedules we commonly see in our business. Please note, these are simplified as well
Work from home day. These are days where all of our work is being done at home. This normally comprised of photo editing, accounting, phone calls with clients, putting together wedding photography timelines, and so on. Basically – 95% of the things require us to sit in front of a computer.
- 8AM – 9AM: Respond to emails
- 9AM – 11AM: Blog
- 11AM – 12PM: Edit photos
- 12PM – 1PM – Break
- 1PM – 4PM – Edit photos
- 4PM – 5PM – Update social media
- 5PM – 5:30PM – Break
- 5:30PM – 6PM – Prospective client phone call
Photo shoot + work from home. These are days where our work day is broken up with actually providing our photography service to clients. It’s the same stuff at home as before, but factoring in additional time to do our job.
- 8AM – 9AM: Photo Shoot
- 9:30AM – 10AM: Respond to emails
- 10AM – 11AM: Blog
- 11AM – 12PM: Edit photos
- 12PM – 1PM – Break
- 1PM – 4PM – Edit photos
- 4PM – 5PM – Update social media
- 5PM – 5:30PM – Break
- 5:30PM – 6PM – Prospective client phone call
Set Business Hours
When we go to a local hardware store, we know they are only going to be open for business between 9AM and 9PM.
Having business hours makes you so you can have time that you can take off for your personal self. If you are running a store or providing a service like us, we all know the work doesn’t stop just because the doors close. But! You can use limited business hours to help with scheduling more taxing parts of the business such as meeting with clients.
By setting hours, you force other people to do business with you on your terms.
Put another way, business hours make people respect your business.
They show up when you say you will be ready and prepared for them. You make people adjust their schedules to work with you, not the other way around.
This isn’t to say you can’t schedule things like meetings outside of these hours from time to time. We absolutely do!
Stick to Any Rules You Set for Yourself
Small business owners are prone to breaking their own rules time and again. As we just talked about setting business hours as a way to really set some baseline expectations with people interested in doing business with you, that’s a good area to continue thinking about.
Business hours provide one simple “rule” for you to live by. Your working time is spent during these hours. Your personal time happens outside of them. By not allowing these to cross, you are creating space for yourself to breath. You are allowing yourself to be healthier too – as we all need down time.
Do One Thing at a Time
It’s easy to think that in order to run a successful small business, you need to multi-task all of the time.
While we wear many hats, we always aim to wear only one at a time.
There are so many things that go into running a business, doing it by yourself, with a partner, or a team of employees requires dedicated attention to one task at a time.
It would be impossible for us to try and shoot photos and do our marketing at the same time. Even if sitting in front of the computer, it would be hard to do our accounting and edit photos at the same time. We suppose it’s possible, but both things would only end up being done half as fast. What’s the use in that?
Use the Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique, as made popular by Francesco Cirillo, and discussed in more detail in his book The Pomodoro Technique: The Acclaimed Time Management System That Has Transformed How We Work, is a simple concept that makes for better work productivity. The idea is to work for 25 minutes, then take a short break (say: 5 minutes), then work for another 25 minutes. Repeat this process. Each time, extend your break times a little longer.
This technique is often applied by people naturally, except for when they are really busy. The real challenge of the application for small business owners is learning how to take these breaks even when things are very busy.
In practice, this may not always be possible, such as if you are managing a grocery store. It might be irresponsible to just go take a little break during a few hours that are particularly busy. But, most other business types and times will allow for this if you give it a try!
Organize Your Emails By Project
If your business receives a lot of email, it is highly important to get a good organization system in place from the start. Fortunately, this is easy enough to do with a small amount of effort.
Using your email client, whether it be Outlook like us or another platform, set up folders by project. As you receive emails, you can move them into these various folders to reference again in the future. If using Outlook, more advanced users can even set up Outlook rules to redirect emails automatically based on certain criteria such as email address, words in a subject line, etc.
Have a Designated Meeting Space
If you have a physical office space for your business, you probably already have this covered. But, for those who run their small business from home, having a designated space to meet with clients and prospective clients is important.
For us, we wouldn’t want to have new clients over to our house to talk business. While we certainly work at home, this is a line we don’t want to cross.
Early on in our business, we had thought it was reasonable to find a meeting space halfway between us and our prospective clients, but this began to get really taxing as our clientele is often 1+ hours away from us.
Over time, we started becoming regulars at a local Starbucks that is about 5 minutes from our home. As new and prospective clients would request to meet in person, we would always suggest meeting at this location. We treat it as our hub. It is a public space where we can meet – without us being highly inconvenienced.
But what if the client has to drive far?
Good question!
We used to feel bad about this. However, we’ve come to realize that if a client is willing to drive to meet us at our designated place – they are more likely to be serious about booking our services. We’ve seen this to be true time-and-again, as about 95% of people who meet with us in person, book with us.
Make Contracts Mandatory for Every Job
Contracts are the lifeblood of business. They are what define in writing the exchange of services and products for money. It dictates what the client needs to provide, and what you as a business owner need to give in return.
Small business owners, particularly those just starting out, can get ahead of themselves and think doing business without a contract can be okay. And in truth, most people you do business with are probably going to be decent folks. Contracts are in place to help set baseline expectations for everyone, and especially needed in case you ever encountered a “worst case scenario”.
While some people still go the pen-and-paper route of contract signing, most products and services are sold with digital contract signing platforms such as DocuSign. You can also find contract signing built into various CRM platforms such as SalesForce or Honeybook (which we use).
Consult a Lawyer for Legal Aspects of the Business You’re Unsure of
Going hand-in-hand with having a contract in place, consulting with a lawyer can be critical to your success as well.
A contract lawyer can review the contract(s) you have, and verify that they would hold up in court in case you were ever sued.
Was this article helpful?10 Posted by: 👨 Robin L. Jackson
