Why choosing professionals to support your small business

If you are a small business owner, no matter how capable, smart, knowledgeable, or experienced you are, you can’t do everything on your own and get the results you want. Therefore, in order to succeed, you need to seek professional help for the things you can’t do on your own, be it accounting, branding, content writing, web design and development, printing, or other activities.

Once you decide in which areas you require help, find suppliers or employ people that can do or provide you exactly with what you need. But be careful to choose the right people or companies.

How to choose the right professionals?

In order to find and choose the right people or companies that can help you succeed with your business, always look for professionals that can for sure do or supply what you need.

When looking for people to employ or freelancers to hire, look at their CV (resume), make sure they have enough experience (at least 5 years would be recommended, but it depends on what your requirement is), and pay attention to their values, such as reliability, commitment, positive attitude, loyalty, hardworking, and other similar values. Ask for references from previous employers or clients, and reference work.

When looking for companies to provide you with products and services, find potential suppliers and try to shortlist three of them. Then, evaluate in more details the following aspects:

• Reliability: Does this supplier look reliable? Can you count on them?
• Competency: Are they able to do the job?
• References: Do they have any references from other customers? Do you know anyone who recommends them?
• Quality: What is the quality level of their products and services?
• Price: Are their prices too low or too high? Is the price worth the quality provided?
• Payment terms: Are they accepting payment at delivery, completion, or 30 days (or more) of credit? Do they require advance payments?
• Communication: Are they responsive? Is it easy to reach them and ask questions?
• On-time delivery: Are they delivering their solutions on time? Do you suspect they might not respect deadlines?

While finalising your suppliers’ selection, check if they offer any discounts for long-term contracts and repeat orders. Then, make your final decision. However, if you are not satisfied with any of those you found, search further.

Why choosing an experienced marketing agency?

Nowadays, a lot of business is conducted online. As such, having a professional online presence is extremely important. That’s why you need to find a suitable marketing agency to help you with all your branding, graphic design, web design and development, and other digital marketing requirements.

When choosing your marketing agency, you need to make sure that they will be replying and taking action promptly, while providing you with quality designs, website, and landing pages with regular website support and maintenance.

If you are just starting your own business, you might have limited resources to pay the top marketing agency in the country. And don’t worry, you don’t need to. You can find a small agency in your home town or elsewhere in your country, or even look for agencies in other countries. As long as you speak the same language, everything can be done remotely by email, phone, and online meetings. The global COVID-19 crisis has just proven that. Keep in mind that there are countries providing quality solutions for lower prices. For example, agencies in Eastern European countries can cost half the price (or less) than those from Western Europe. But be careful not to look only at the price. You still need to make sure they provide you with good quality solutions.

And if you are thinking to just ask your friend or a student to make the website for you and take care of hosting, maintenance and support, because he can do it for EUR 200, please, think twice. There must be a reason if the price is so low. If not done properly, the website might still look good in the beginning, but if it is not on a safe server, and is not being properly and regularly updated and maintained, you risk for the website to go down, get a malware, or have other issues.

In summary

To summarise, think about which products and services you require from other professionals or businesses, and then look at your options. Within the suppliers’ identification, evaluation and selection process, consider the points presented earlier in this article.

It might happen that one of your suppliers does not perform as well as you thought, or maybe they shut down their business. Don’t worry. If you are not satisfied with one of your suppliers, just go back to your previous shortlist and choose another one. There are many suppliers for the most different products and services you might need. So don’t worry, you will find a good one for your business too.

To help small businesses in these challenging times, at IB4SME we have just prepared a turnkey website and promotion package – WEB4SME, available only for the first 20 orders.

Find out more about this promotion at https://ib4sme.com/web-for-sme/.

?

#IB4SME #EmailMarketing #Website #WebDesign #WebHosting #SocialMediaMarketing #Branding