Your Business Budget Doesn’t Add Up Without These 4 Things
Budgeting your money is one of the biggest hurdles you’ll have to overcome when you start your own business. It’s a whole different game to managing your personal finances and there is an endless list of things that you need to remember. You’ve probably thought about all of the obvious ones like the cost of an office space, salaries, marketing etc. but there are a lot of things that you’re bound to have missed off. That’s a big problem because you need to be working with a tight budget in the early days of your new business and if you get hit with unexpected costs, it could be the end of you. When you’re drawing up a monthly budget for your new business, make sure that you haven’t left these things out.
Search Engine Optimization
You should have set aside a portion of your money for marketing already, but more specifically, you need to be spending money on search engine optimization (SEO). If you’re not a marketing expert you might not know what it is and how important it is. SEO determines where your website appears on the search results on Google which is so vital because that’s how a massive chunk of your potential customer base is going to find you. SEO isn’t something that you can really handle on your own if you don’t know what you’re doing so you’ll need the money to pay an expert.
Inventory Storage
Nobody is going to forget to account for the cost of manufacturing and shipping their products, but have you thought about what you’re going to do with them in between? A lot of people don’t but you need somewhere to store all of that inventory, most likely a warehouse. Click here to search for warehouses and get an idea of how much it’s going to cost. Your other option is to have a third party handle all of your shipping for you but then you relinquish a certain level of control over the process and the service isn’t necessarily going to be as good for your customers. If you do run your own warehouse, then you will want to think about utilizing software to help you with your inventory. You may want to take a look at an integrated MYOB inventory management solution, and others like it, to see how this can be of benefit to running your business so you can remain efficient with your orders.
Maintenance Costs
You’ll be paying rent on your office space and your warehouse but that’s not the only thing that you’ll need to shell out for. What happens when you get a burst pipe in the building or the power goes out and you need to call somebody out to fix it? That’s going to cost you a lot of money and it can hit out of nowhere. You need to have a cash buffer set aside to deal with any situations like that so they don’t land you in hot water.
Insurance
Nobody likes dealing with insurance and you might not have considered it but it’s so important. You’ll need insurance on the building in case of any damage and also to protect you against lawsuits if employees are injured. You also need to get business interruption insurance which covers you if you can’t use the business premises for a while and you have to cease trading.
If you forget these business costs when you’re budgeting, you’ll be in for a nasty shock further down the line and it could put you in some serious financial trouble.
*This is a collaborative post.
