What should small business owners know

As a business owner, you want to have goals and a plan for your business so you can stay on track toward success. A growth strategy can help propel your business to the next level and help you stay laser-focused on the areas that will contribute to your bottom line. In your journey as a small business owner, there will always be new things to learn, but the 12 concepts above are foundational.

Keep them in mind when forming your marketing strategy, and you can expect success. Kristen is the Senior Managing Editor at WordStream where she helps businesses make sense of online marketing and advertising.

She specializes in local SEO, copywriting, and conversion optimization, and finds life to be exponentially more delightful on a bicycle. Other posts by Kristen McCormick. Every great partnership starts with that first email, phone call, or meeting. So what are you waiting for? Simplified local marketing is just a hop, skip and a click away. Keep in mind that organizations with fewer than 50 employees are not required to provide their employees with health insurance, but those with over 50 employees must or they will be subject to fines.

Stay up to date with the new law and how it specifically affects your business by taking a webinar from the Small Business Administration. But if you want to grow your company, you must figure out a way to continually draw in new clientele and keep them coming back. According to the Small Business Association , marketing your small business includes market research who is your audience? To run a small business you must be capable of wearing many different hats and continually keep up on the latest rules or culture of this world.

Reviewing this list will allow you to remain on top of your business game and be in a much better position to expand it! The interface is polished, fast, fluid and intuitive, and the amount of features available are pretty amazing. It will be my project management software for the foreseeable future, and the only one I recommend to clients and colleagues.

Since switching to Hiveage my productivity has soared. The intuitive interface allows me to quickly send invoices on the go as well as offering outstanding reporting tools - I love it! Start your day free trial and see for yourself. No credit card required. Not creating a business plan is perhaps one of the most common mistakes, and it's a troubling one, because business plans can help you identify issues with your idea, and also help market to potential investors or other sources of funding.

Before you start on a new venture, draft a simple business plan that identifies your proposed product or service, the costs involved, your funding needs, your competitors, potential customers and market opportunity. Also detail realistic challenges your business can expect to face.

With a business plan in hand, you'll have a better sense of your funding needs, which will help you avoid two classic traps: over- or underspending. Some entrepreneurs misjudge costs, and end up spending more than they budgeted, while others spend too little to give their business a realistic chance, in the mistaken belief that being careful and frugal is always the right way to proceed.

Do your best to estimate actual costs of funding your venture through launch and the first year. The SBA offers a great start-up costs tool that helps estimate new business funding needs.

Then, find ways to secure the capital you'll need. Her motto: 'Dream like a kid'. The same issue of too much or too little is present when considering business partners.

In many cases, you can't launch a venture alone — you'll need partners or investors for funding and know-how. By staying true to your passion and purpose, you will be able to communicate your genuine and organic message to your customers.

She also shares three factors that small business owners should keep in mind when creating go to market strategies. In Chapter 12, we talked about monitoring key KPIs for your business — and all the benefits that come from doing so. Data is the key to understanding your customers. This, in turn, will help you grow your business.

They help with coordination, agile project management , and website growth. For a couple of moments, forget about the competition, the state of the market, the small details in your logistics strategy.

Come back to your purpose and brand purpose. Your goal should always be to be the best at what you do. When you look at the big picture and ask yourself how to be the best at what you do, you will find that your priorities arrive much easier. From my experience working in small businesses and overseeing business development for small businesses and our clients here at 1Digital, I believe one of the biggest roadblocks that small business owners run into is that they want to solve every problem at once and want to try to do too much at the same time.

Although this is typical of an entrepreneur and a small business owner, I have found that being great at one thing lends itself better to the initial growth and development of a smaller company as opposed to trying to spread yourself too thin. This can be an overwhelming amount of obstacles when resources are limited to small businesses.

Look at your business as a whole — how do you tie together your brand message and experience? How does it connect? The reality is owning a small business is no easy task. Being passionate about what you do, the products you sell, and the customers you do business with will help give your business purpose and a drive for growth.

This emotional connection and drive will keep you having fun in your day-to-day journey to success — and extend in to how you manage your business. Focusing on what features your business needs to succeed and how you can deliver the best user experience to your customers will make for strong decision making skills.

One of the most helpful decisions you can make for your business is choosing an ecommerce platform, like BigCommerce, that will work with you to bring your business to life — your way. Subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter to get the latest thought leadership content delivered right to your inbox — from blogs and resource articles, to podcast episodes, webinars and more.

She holds a B. When she's not curating content, Beatriz loves to travel the world, share her journey with Type 1 Diabetes, and find Austin's most Instagram friendly spots. Introducing the all-new Make it Big Podcast — a thought leadership audio series for retailers, entrepreneurs and ecommerce professionals.