Small Business Tips for Success Business Expansion

Growing your small business into a larger business is built on consistency.

If you offer a great product one day, and a month later people who are buying it are finding it to be of a poor quality – then no one is going to want to buy it going forward.

In practice, some of the best products have been around for a long time and maintained a consistent quality. There is a reason why people continue to buy Coke – even though it’s been around for decades, the taste has been roughly the same since the start. Every time you buy a can, you know what to expect. This is what consistency boils down to.

Depending on your industry, how you maintain consistency can vary. Some companies benefit from adhering to ISO standards, and this requires fully documenting how your products are produced and regulated.

Dedicating your business to serving your customers 110% is critically important.

That in itself is probably the #1 small business tips we can give you!

One of the most obvious ways to achieve this is by giving your clients a way to directly interact with your business when it comes to working together. As we’ve already covered, having a website is a great way to give customers an area to be exposed with your brand. Once they’ve decided that, “Hey! I want to work with this company!!” – what do they do next?

After getting in touch with your business, you need a way to funnel them into a system that will allow you to send a contract for signing, send invoices, and so on. A CRM platform is the best way to do this – and enables all of these interactions to happen online.

In our world, we use Honeybook as our CRM. This is a great platform suitable for a wide range of industries. In it, we send and sign contracts with our clients. We send invoices and allow our clients to make payments online. Maybe most importantly – it keeps a constantly available record for both us and our client to reference. As a booking platform, it’s incredibly simple to use. We’ve been complimented by our clients on the simplicity of this process – something that is great to hear for sure!

Or if you want to check it out yourself, if you sign up using our referral link, you will be able to take 50% off of your subscription for the first year. Given the 30-day free trial period you can sign up for, and the Honeybook subscription cost for the first year being just $200 – it is easy to see why this could be a great value for you.

In all the small business tips we have to offer, the most obvious one would be the need to be well educated on whatever product or service you are offering. Even before you start your business, having a supporting background in your industry will be beneficial. However, as we have significantly learned, professional knowledge can only grow and expand.

With photography, we’ve been well versed on the technical aspect of it – but have never needed to photograph in environments like we’ve faced on wedding days. In our personal photography lives, we can normally dictate the light and environment we shoot in. On wedding days, this is tied down to a wedding timeline. The shoot must go on no matter the conditions! Learning to adapt has required continued education on our part.

Of course, education also involves other areas of your business. You might be the greatest at selling a photo service, but might be seriously lacking at how to actually run a business. Small business education, then, is an important thing.

While education comes in many forms, we recommend using online courses to get what you need in this area.

You can also use a website like Udemy to find comprehensive courses on topics of your choice, too! These are especially great because they are assembled not just by college professors, but people with real life experience who have something valuable to share.

As photographers, we are a little biased here – but if you have a physical product, you should definitely consider having proper product photos taken. These photos help you to represent your product in the best light (no pun intended!).

Most of the time, you’re not going to be the first person to enter your industry of choice. There are often big names and brands sitting at the top of the industry. In the photography world, Annie Leibovitz is a household name. Her work is very distinct, and her business capabilities are pretty difficult to surpass.

No matter your industry, it’s important to research and see how others have succeeded. What have they done to set their business apart? Some people ride on a great product alone, while others interject much more personality into the branding mix.

Everything you do as a business, document how it’s done. This is especially important when you have employees. One big loss companies face when people leave their company is all the knowledge they take with them. This includes knowledge of workarounds people might have been using as a result of being on the job and knowing some things are broken.

As time goes on, businesses have to change. They have to change to stay relevant. It can be hard to implement changes, but without it, businesses go out of business. Lately, we’ve seen so many cases of big businesses that were once a staple in their industries lose track and file bankruptcy.

As with everything, the need to adapt and change should be well thought out. You shouldn’t just change to go with every new trend that comes around. But, thinking in the long term, you need to be able to project what people will want in 6 months, one year, 5 years, 20 years…

One of the best feelings in the world for us has been growing our business to a point where we are not desperate for business. Being able to decline jobs, even well paying ones, because we don’t want to do them is gratifying. As artists, we aim to do shoots that resonate with us. In the world of weddings, this includes shooting at places that are unique and interesting, working with other vendors we know and respect, and shooting weddings that are thematically in our ballpark.

Saying “no” is also something that comes up when there are just things we don’t do, or would be uncomfortable doing. You should absolutely feel empowered as a business owner to say “no” when it makes sense for you!

One of the hardest things to do as a business owner is to be real about the things you can’t do. Sometimes, we’re just not particularly good at some things.

For us, this goes back into our high school and college years with neither of us being good at math. Outside of some basic accounting, any jobs we’d have to do that required more complex math would probably need to be outsourced.

The last of these small business tips is the most important. Let your clients be motivators for you. We’ve experienced this so heavily ourselves. Working day jobs alongside our photography business, we know what it feels like to completely lose motivation at work. Our business, as challenging as it is at times, has been the most rewarding thing we’ve ever done. At the end of the day, while the money is great, the feedback we receive from our clients hits us really hard. To see some of this feedback take the form of great reviews for us motivates us to push even harder.