It’s time to take off your business’s training wheels

Starting up a company from nothing and turning it into a business is a goal that you should be proud of accomplishing. However, no matter how great your business is, it will always be considered a startup during its infancy. This is just an unfortunate side-effect of being the newbie in an industry, but it doesn’t always have to be like this.

Many startups tend to lean on their “startup” label like training wheels. They use it to explain failures, they use it to gain more trust, and they use it as a way to excuse shady practices. For instance, it’s not uncommon for startups in the software industry to release half-baked software or games in an attempt to gain early interest. Running an alpha or beta test is perfectly acceptable, but sadly these developers are taking consumers for a ride by charging them close to full price for their half-finished software. This is unacceptable by most standards, but because they are a new startup, it’s apparently fine.

We’ll let you in on a secret: it’s not okay to do that. If you really want to be taken seriously instead of being shunned and ridiculed behind your back, then here are some ways you can finally remove those training wheels without falling flat on your face a few seconds after.

You need to spend money to make money

This is perhaps one of the most obvious sayings in business that not everyone follows. Frankly, it’s silly that businesses aren’t willing to spend money in order to make more. For instance, there are people that believe “not making a profit” is a bad thing. What they don’t realise is that the company isn’t making a profit during a quarter because all of their capital is being reinvested into the business, hence why they technically haven’t made any profit.

Let’s put it into layman’s terms. If your business makes $50,000 during a period of pure profit, what are you going to do with that? You could distribute the profit among your employees as a bonus to tell them it’s a job well done or you can pay out dividends to your shareholders. That’s a great way to get extra money into people’s actual wallets, but what would be the smarter option here? Investing that $50,000 back into the business of course! You could hire a new employee, buy some new equipment or even start up a new marketing campaign to make even more money in the future! It’s simple now that you think about it, but it’s amazing that so few business owners realise this. They are fixated on the short-term gains they can make and not about the long-term which is their ultimate downfall—they simply don’t have vision.

Don’t be afraid to invest

Let’s face it, no one likes to spend $5000 on their business to upgrade a few computers or buy some new desks for their employees, but it has to be done. Let’s say it once more; you have to spend money to make money!

Let’s assume that you are running your own business that sells toys. Let’s say that you are hiring an outsourced driver to pick up and deliver these goods from your warehouse to retailers and it’s costing you a fortune. This is where you need to consider hiring your own driver that works within your company and to do that you’re going to need a truck. But how do you buy one? You can finance it of course! There are plenty of truck finance options available to businesses and although it might sound a bit silly to purchase a truck so early, the idea is to plan ahead for the future. Not only does obtaining your own truck and a driver give you more flexible options, it’s cheaper in the long run if you plan to run your business for a long time (you should be) and the truck can be used for other purposes in the future.

If you’re still scared of spending money that your business has made then perhaps business isn’t really your forte right now. You have to remove the fear of “using” profits that your company has made because, at the end of the day, you need to invest money in order make your business successful.

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Aiming high

As a business owner, you should always be planning a couple of steps ahead. If you are currently dominating a market then you need to make a decision; do you stay in your comfort zone and secure your grip, or do you diversify so that you can sell more products and reach a wider audience? These are the kind of difficult decisions that you have to make as a business owner. It’s not easy, we know, but this is why you need to have a plan and you need to have a goal.

Let’s say your goal is to dominate a market. In the previous example given, you’ve reached your goal for now, but there will always be competitors. In this situation, you should funnel all of your profits into bolstering your brand and gaining a complete and total dominance of your market. Your market share should be as high as you can make it and preferably over 50%. An example of market share dominance is Microsoft’s line of Operating Systems, Windows, which currently has over 90% market share. This is an incredibly triumph over their competitors, Linux and Mac OS X. This is what it means to have total dominance over a market, so if this is your goal you need to aspire for a ludicrously high market share such as Microsoft Windows.

Final words

There’s no magic number or figure that you have to obtain in order to remove the training wheels and be promoted to a business. It’s more of a mentality thing; you need to get out of the mindset that you have training wheels to fall back on should you fail, and you need to stop giving excuses as to why you aren’t pushing your brand. In fact, the word “startup” has become an overused buzzword that was supposed to represent new businesses. Nowadays, it’s a word used to make excuses for a business or to give a business more attention just because it’s new. Let’s take off those training wheels and start to take business seriously.