Small business owners, specifically within a South African context, have to tackle the massive feat of building a brand, which takes courage and unrestrained passion. The entrepreneurial potential of the African continent is bottomless, yet many small businesses do not last long enough to expand and to see the fruits of their labour blossom. This is often due to lack of access to funding, or mismanaged money. Both of these causes are easily avoidable, if you know which tools to use, most of which are completely free and can help you to manage your business and its finances. Here are a few tools or online artifacts that all business owners should consider getting, in order to have a hubspot for business activity.
1. A comprehensive idea of how to manage your business cash flow
Cash flow universally is defined as a business's month-by-month income and expenses. If a business consistently has negative cash flow, then the longevity of the business is under threat. To avoid consistently going into the negatives, the obvious solution is to keep track of your business's income and expenses. Not only does this mean that you can avoid spending business money in an unsustainable way, but it allows you to forecast income and expenses going forward, as you will start to pick up on certain spending patterns over time. Keeping track of your cash flow, which allows for better forecasting, helps you to make more clarified and better business decisions.
2. Seek professional advice and guidance
Seeking advice from industry professionals or from aspirational entrepreneurs is an important way to breathe life and direction into your business idea. However, in order for this advice to be useful and applicable to your unique idea, you need to have a deep understanding of your business idea, in order to ask more focused and direct questions.
Examples of questions you should consider before seeking advice:
- If your business were to fail, what are the potential liabilities?
- Will your business employ staff, and if so, how many staff members will you hire?
- How much money do you anticipate that you will make in your first year (before and after expenses)?
- Will you work remotely, build a storefront, or rent an office space?
- How much of your own money do you have for start-up costs, and how much money will you need to borrow?
Knowing the answers to these questions can help you form a more tangible idea of your business in your head. This means that when the time comes for you to ask others for help and advice, their answers can more easily slot into your business idea and can be moulded based on your business's particular needs.
3. Find a good budgeting tool
Having a budget and a mechanism that measures it, is the bridge your business needs between forming its goals, and making decisions that ensure these goals are reached. You can use online budgeting tools to track cash flow budgets and profit and loss budgets. These tools include things like budgeting software, or Excel templates that you can adjust according to your business type, size, structure, etc.
4. Free invoicing software
Invoices are sent to customers, once you have sold a good or service, and are a request to these customers for payment. Invoicing can require a lot of admin and time and so with the right software, an invoice can be created in minutes, sent directly to customers, and saved in a system for bookkeeping purposes. Using invoicing software not only saves you time, but allows you to keep all of your invoices in one place, making your business systems easy to navigate and track.
5. Google Analytics
If your business has a website or runs advertisements on Google, Google Analytics is a no-brainer for tracking your business performance. It is a platform that can show you the most common ways that people discover your website, and it can reveal to you which sections of your website people interact with the most. Knowing these things can help you to direct more website traffic, and can help you to improve certain website components that may be lacking traffic.
6. Collaborative Office Suite
An office suite is a bundle of different software applications that work cohesively to handle typical business tasks like analyses, presentation building, document creation and communication between employees. Microsoft's Office Suite is a great example of being one platform that can: create and receive emails, generate spreadsheets and presentations, use Word to create documents, reports, etc and it can use OneNote for organising digital notes and having some form of a cloud-based storage facility. Another commonly known office suite is Google's WorkSpace.
Having an office suite allows all employees to work and communicate collaboratively and ensures syncing across devices - meaning all progress and business artifacts are stored and accessed in one place. This not only saves time when an employee needs to locate something, but it also aids in sharper decision-making, with past data being able to be used to inform future actions going forward.
Now what?
A business can only be as strong as the idea and foundation it began with. Before using and exploring any of these tools, business owners need to give their idea shape, form and life. They need to be able to envision exactly what it would look like, if it were to magically exist tomorrow. Only then, can these tools be of use to a business, because then the tools are used to heighten performance and improve execution, instead of being used to do all the heavy lifting.
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