One of the more tricky areas to contend with when you are working on starting your own business is the budget. The financial side of things can seem like an overwhelming task, especially for someone with very little experience, therefore, many people try their best to avoid thinking about the numbers until it is too late and they are left in a financial mess early on.
Having a budget for your business is a vital part of ensuring its success because when you have a clear view of expenses and profits, you are able to work on cost-cutting measures, increasing profits, and controlling cash flow. If you are currently in the position of planning the budget for your startup, then read below for tips on how to do just that.
1. Plan Your Business
Start off with your business plan, in this plan you need to cover your development plan, your marketing strategies, sales plan, and anything else that will factor into your business. Your business plan should be thorough and all elements accounted for. Having a full picture of the components of your business will help you break down the necessary budgets for each section.
2. Investigate the Competition
Whatever sector your business comes under, you will have competitors all around you. Of course, you want to be bigger and better than they are, so, carry out an investigation of your competitors early on.
There are many tools to do this, but the best way is by using Spokeo. Spokeo is a reverse phone lookup tool that allows you to have a more in-depth insight into a person; it lets you see information such as what social media accounts they are associated with if they have been involved in criminal activity, and public records that are connected to them, mailing lists and more.
This kind of information can help you see how your competitors handle their business, how they market their business, and if they are trustworthy. All of this is extremely useful when getting to know what you are up against.
With Spokeo, you could use their phone number, or email to find this information. Simply, enter the phone number or email of the person you are looking into, and the reverse number lookup could find all the details that you need, from a database of thousands of different sources. Spokeo is without a doubt the best way to stay one step ahead of everyone else.
3. Estimate Your Expenses
This should be a fairly simple task; from your business plan, you will be able to estimate how much you need to spend on marketing, resources, and labour for every month.
Obviously, you won’t be able to get an exact figure, but you will be able to estimate accurately enough for you to know what you can expect to be paying out each month. Knowing this figure in advance is an essential part of you being able to plan your overall budget.
4. Estimate Your Monthly Sales
Estimating your monthly sales will be harder than planning your outgoings, after all, you are in control of what you spend, but you are not in control of what other people buy from you. However, again, this is an important step in getting together your startup’s budget. You can get an idea of your sales forecast by using the sales information online of those businesses similar to yours, depending on their company, a lot of a company’s financial details can be found online. You can also calculate your lead generation abilities, and take an average of the income you would expect to obtain from those leads.
5. Find Investors
If you have done all of the above and realized that your budget doesn’t quite stretch to where you need it to be, then a great solution to this is finding investors. There are thousands of people out there just waiting to invest in the next big thing, and that could be you.
You can sign up to websites that are for startups looking for investors, or even do some research and find investors in person in your local area. You will probably only need to impress one investor to hit the budget you need for your business.
Planning a budget isn’t as scary as it sounds, and with the right attitude and tools, you will be well on your way to having everything you need to make yours a success.
Maguire Haigh is a content marketing manager for Spokeo. He is an expert in the business sphere. He prefers writing articles on marketing, social media presence, travel and startup topics. Maguire has great experience in travelling and deep knowledge of 5 foreign languages.