This is the second article discussing moving towards selling your products.
Following on from my previous article discussing starting a business, funding and premises I’m going to move on to talk about beginning to sell. Obviously this was what my business would depend on and the sooner I could begin making sales the sooner the business would be growing and developing.
After officially launching my company in February 2005 I was chomping at the bit to get orders and money coming in. It was, however, September of that year before I began to make sales. This period of research and development was extremely frustrating for me – you’ve taken the big step, set up your company, got your product and all you want to do is see it fly but in reality you have to chip away day by day at product design, marketing, building a website, setting up systems – all of the things you probably don’t or didn’t think about. This was, without a doubt, the toughest 6 months I had with the business.
Building Blocks
As I mentioned in my previous article, one of the most common phrases I hear when talking about launching your own business is ‘I just wouldn’t know where to start’. My answer to this is always ‘Anywhere’. Setting up your first business can be so intimidating and there is an overwhelming fear of doing things wrong (I’ve found this particularly among women). People assume that others who have done it know or knew something they don’t and got everything right. This is far from the truth. A lot of the hurdles in business will be encountered in the first 6 months to 1 year. Basically, the sooner you realise that you will make mistakes the better, they aren’t always a bad thing and you can learn a lot from trial and error.
During this early stage of your business life there’s nothing more important than to keep working at it. Your dedication will be pushed and your resolve tested – keep motivated. At the same time try not to be blinkered and forge ahead with your idea dead set in your mind. This can be risky because you need to accommodate all of the advice and research you’ll be picking up. Don’t be afraid to alter your path, to have different variations of your idea – this is the time for that!
Just remember that this early stage is essential and is valuable time to lay building blocks for what’s to come. These are like the foundations of a house – they won’t be seen but will stop it from falling down. Use this time wisely, put effective systems in place – systems that allow for growth and expansion.
Beginning to Sell
Once your business is built and your product ready you’re going to be keen to sell something! Even if you’re business started because you were selling something first and built the business around that (a lot do) this will still be relevant to you.
The first thing you need to think about is how you’re going to sell. For a lot, this will be obviously and may be pre-determined by the product. I fell into this category in a way. How are you going to sell your product or service? There are a lot of ways from website selling to store retailing and even selling on TV shows. Explore the possibilities here. I went straight for a website given the nature of my product – I later rolled this out into retail through various technologies but there are a lot of ways to sell things and the advantage of this age is that you can a lot at once.
You can have a great store front with a superb website, be selling on eBay and Amazon and Bid Up TV, you can be in all the major catalogues, you can have agents selling for you, you can have franchises. There are so many possibilities.
I approached one at a time. I developed my website and worked hard to get order volumes up. This constant level of work meant that I had a profitable business quickly and that I had cash coming in to finance expansion.
