How To Stay Afloat Launching a New Business in 2021
To put it lightly, 2021 has followed on from 2020 and started off in a very weird way. We’ve all experienced an exceptional level of chance over the past year, and for most people their lifestyle now is entirely different to how it was back then. One of the main changes for a huge proportion of the workforce has been the move to remote, rather than in-office, working - and many are choosing to continue on this path as we begin to exit the pandemic.
As well as showing us that remote working is possible and, according to some studies, even more productive, the time we’ve all had to spare this year has led to many people realising their dream of starting their own business. Their experiences of working from home has given them confidence in their abilities to manage their time and work independently, as well as the space to work on their ideas.
However, though the landscape might have changed, starting up a business is still a complex undertaking - it just has different challenges now than it did a year ago. One of the biggest problems facing those who have decided to start a new business in 2021 is avoiding becoming overwhelmed by taking on too much. Few realise when starting out just how time consuming all the different elements of running a business are - especially when they know they can work from home, thinking this will give them limitless extra time.
So what are some ideas for timesaving and keeping your sanity when becoming a business owner in 2021?
Have a clear content strategy
As a small business, a great way to build a customer base is to have a strong social media presence and ideally a blog which goes up weekly or biweekly. This builds engagement with your target market and increases brand authority.
However, scrambling every day to come up with social media content and panicking about next week’s blog topic is not ideal when you have so much else to do. The best way around this is to dedicate one day every couple of weeks to plan your whole social media presence for the next couple of weeks. You can plan out posts and topics, and even schedule posts on facebook and twitter so you don’t have to worry about it.
This way, you only have to spend a few minutes each day uploading a pre-planned post to instagram (a great place for small businesses). You can still make additional posts when you feel like it, but you don’t have to worry about creating a presence every day because you’ve already done it!
Simplify Your Bookkeeping with Outsourcing
Another thing that takes up a surprising amount of time and energy is the financial side of things like bookkeeping and budget planning - this is the stuff that keeps you up until the small hours. Luckily, it’s also one of the easiest things to outsource - there are plenty of options out there to hire professionals with handy financial management skill sets, like CFOshare services for small business owners. It might seem like a big responsibility to let go of, and it is - but it’s also an easy one for someone else to get the hang of and take’s a huge amount of weight off your shoulders.
Financial planning and content scheduling are two hugely time consuming aspects of starting a business which can easily become overwhelming - but through a mixture of efficient planning and outsourcing, you can take the weight off your shoulders and avoid getting overwhelmed.
