The old saying “you have to have money in order to make money” could not be any more wrong. Thousands, if not millions, of people have started their own very business, with next to no cash at all. Many of these people never even studied in anything related to business management, but have still managed to grow their businesses and become incredibly successful. There’s no special secret to this either, and nothing that you have to pay for in order to learn, anyone can start their own business with minimal resources—they just need to know how. In no particular order here are all the things that you need to do to start your own business when you don’t have much cash.
Educate Yourself
There are plenty of ways that you can educate yourself about starting and running a business, for little, or no cost at all. Free ebooks are a good example, as is checking out the books at your local library or reading the blogs of people that have experience in starting their own business. Another option is to enroll on an online course based on something like business, entrepreneurship or sales. Doing any of these things will allow you to develop the skills that you need for starting your own business, for next to nothing.
Make A Free Website
When you’re just starting out, and don’t have much money to spare, there isn’t any point in splashing out on having a website professionally designed. Instead you should just build a free website yourself. Doing so isn’t difficult at all, and you don’t have to know anything about HTML or CSS. This is because there are plenty of businesses that offer free website builders specifically for businesses. A great example can be found at http://www.decosites.com. Using a service like this will allow you to easily create a website that does exactly what you need it to do.
Make A Minimum Viable Product
The last thing that you want to do when starting a business with a small budget is to spend ages creating a product or service without testing it out first. Unfortunately this is what a lot of people do, and it often leads to failure. Rather than spending ages planning and creating a product or service what you need to do is create a minimum viable product. This will allow you to quickly determine whether or not people actually like your product or service, before you put a lot of time and money into in.
Call In Favours
Calling in favours is a great way to keep costs down when trying to start your own business with very little starting capital. Don’t feel bad doing it, as if you’re owed a favour you have to use it at some point or another. For example, say you have a friend who’s a graphic designer that you helped to move furniture into their home, ask them if they would design you a logo. Getting things done this way will really help you out, and won’t cost you anything at all, meaning that you can put more resources into other areas of your startup business.
Use Your Home As An Office
If you’re just starting out and you’re already looking for office space you’re doing it wrong. You don’t need an office yet, because offices can cost a lot of money. Instead you should just use your home as your office instead for the time being. This will save you a considerable amount of money as it won’t cost you any extra, and you won’t have to commute.
Outsource
Outsourcing is a great way to minimize costs when you’re first starting out. Take some time to work-out what parts of your business you can outsource to others for a low cost, and which parts you can’t. Then go about finding someone to outsource your work to. Bear in mind, that you should ensure that the person/company that you outsource to only deliver high quality work, because at the end of the day it’s your business that they will be representing.
Conclusion
Starting your own business when you don’t much cash can be done, and pretty easily as well. Just take the above advice on board and you will be one step further toward creating your own company. Best of luck!
