Vital Professional Services When You’re Running a Small Business
When you’re running a small business, you need to be both an expert and a generalist. You need to be the expert in your product or service. You’re the face of your company, and you’re the best person to sell it to your customers and clients, especially in early days when you don’t have any dedicated Sales staff.
You also need to do all the administrative plate spinning for your business: looking after rent, employees’ wages, developing your staff to ensure you’re getting the most from them and any other matters arising. In military terms you’re dealing with both strategy and tactics: the broad overview (“we need to capture that castle”) and the moment to moment specifics (“how are we going to capture that castle?”).
This can be a heavy burden, one of the biggest factors that makes running a small business stressful. You can lighten this burden by making sure you use all the support available to you. There are plenty of professionals and businesses that can take some of that rote work off your hands, leaving you clear to focus on the aspects of your business you really care about. Lawyers
Whether you go to a high street lawyer in person or find a reliable internet based lawyer to work with while saving some time and money, the services of a lawyer are vital, especially in the early days of your business.
They can ensure you’re compliant with the law when you set up and register your business and review contract terms before you sign agreements to rent premises, hire staff and buy in products to make sure you’re getting the best deal and avoid unpleasant surprises down the line.
While it doesn’t make sense for a small business to keep a lawyer on a permanent retainer, not using one at all is a false economy that could prove very damaging to you in the long run.
Temping and Interim
There are some aspects of running a business that require specialist knowledge and experience to optimise, and one way to get the best results is to temporarily hire people with this experience to set up systems that can then run independently of them.
For example, as your pool of employees begins to expand, hiring an Interim HR specialist to set systems to track holiday and sickness and begin a review programme to make sure your employees are performing well and developing their skills.
These systems can then be used by people who are less experienced but they can still get great results for your business.