Starting a business can be very exciting and shouldn’t be that hard. Chances are your starting a business in your trade or area that you’ve worked in for a number of years. From your experience you know what the client likes to buy and have a good idea of what prices are being charged.

Type of business
Wholesale or retail
Building a sustaining client base

These days there are more avenues for people to find you, and great mailing systems around Australia and the world. So you’re not just limited to selling your product or service to your local area.

The first thing is to decide what kind of business your starting, whether it’s mail out business where you work from home using catalogues, website or ebay? Or a business with a shop front where your primary market is people walking or driving by? Or whether it’s a home business servicing the local community.

You may decide to go solely wholesale, which is where you sell your products at a discounted price and provide catalogues to your retail outlets to sell your goods. To get the retail outlets on board you may have to provide them with a retail catalogue that they can show the customer. You also may have to barcode all your products.

You may decide to go both ways and provide your goods directly to the customer by retail through a shop front or website and provide your product by wholesale to other retail outlets. Which may get complicated if you don’t have recommended retail prices in order and stick to them yourself. This is done successfully both ways for example you can buy Apple ipods from retail outlets and directly from apple or for example you can’t by any 3M products from them directly but only through their distributers.

Something to realise is that it’s going to take a while to build up your business, if you’re just starting out it’s important to take little steps at a time to build up your client base and develop your business to cater for the clients needs.

One of the first things to remember is to offer the best service possible, by doing this your more likely to keep that customer for years to come which is essential to sustaining a business. And you’ll also receive more customers that have been referred to you by others, which are the best kind because they little convincing to trust you.

For example if you’re serving a customer offer them your full attention and try to help them the best of your ability, this may involve sending them to a competitor that offers something that you don’t offer yet. Smile when answering the phone, it will come across in your voice that your happy to talk to them and provide great service.

It can be a hassle if you’re a business and you have a big list of suppliers to order things from. If you can offer what others are offering at a good quality and price with great service this will help you create a more sustaining business.

Kind regards,